| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum: in a warm cloak, perching the bundle upon his own broad shoulders, and
then he tramped through the snow and the drifts of the Valley and
across the plain beyond to the poor cottage where Weekum's mother lived.
"See, mama!" cried the boy, as soon as they entered, "I've got a cat!"
The good woman wept tears of joy over the rescue of her darling and
thanked Claus many times for his kind act. So he carried a warm and
happy heart back to his home in the Valley.
That night he said to puss: "I believe the children will love the
wooden cats almost as well as the real ones, and they can't hurt them
by pulling their tails and ears. I'll make another."
So this was the beginning of his great work.
The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by
Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indagine,
and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of
Tieck; and the City of the Sun by Campanella. One favourite
volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium
Inquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there
were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs
and OEgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His
chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an
exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic--the manual of
a forgotten church--the Vigiliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiae
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will
confess that the abomination of "Fancy-work" - that standing cloak
for dreamy idleness (not to mention the injury which it does to
poor starving needlewomen) - has all but vanished from your
drawing-room since the "Lady-ferns" and "Venus's hair" appeared;
and that you could not help yourself looking now and then at the
said "Venus's hair," and agreeing that Nature's real beauties were
somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures which they had
superseded.
You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same
Natural History. For do not you, the London merchant, recollect
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