| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: as you may see in English galleries painted by Wilson, a famous
artist who died before you were born. You recollect Lord
Macaulay's ballad, "The Battle of the Lake Regillus"? Then that
Lake Regillus (if I recollect right) is one of these round crater
lakes. Many such deep clear blue lakes have I seen in the Eifel,
in Germany; and many a curious plant have I picked on their
shores, where once the steam blasted, and the earthquake roared,
and the ash-clouds rushed up high into the heaven, and buried all
the land around in dust, which is now fertile soil. And long did
I puzzle to find out why the water stood in some craters, while
others, within a mile of them perhaps, were perfectly dry. That I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: sea in which the atoms of the material bodies are as islands, and
it occupies the whole of what we call empty space. It is so
sensitive that a disturbance in any part of it causes a "tremour
which is felt on the surface of countless worlds." Our old
experiences of matter give us no account of any substance like
this; yet the undulatory theory of light obliges us to admit such
a substance, and that theory is as well established as the theory
of gravitation. Obviously we have here an enlargement of our
experience of matter. The analysis of the phenomena of light and
radiant heat has brought us into mental relations with matter in
a different state from any in which we previously knew it. For
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: found out."
Mr. Mudge, who had remained on the bench, looked up at her; she
often preferred to be quiet when he proposed to walk, but now that
he seemed to wish to sit she had a desire to move. "But you
haven't told me what HE has found out."
She considered her lover. "He'd never find YOU, my dear!"
Her lover, still on his seat, appealed to her in something of the
attitude in which she had last left Captain Everard, but the
impression was not the same. "Then where do I come in?"
"You don't come in at all. That's just the beauty of it!"--and
with this she turned to mingle with the multitude collected round
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