The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: The sorrow that beneath their smiling sleeps,
And guess what bitter tears a mother weeps
When the cross darkens her unclouded skies?
Sad Lady, if some mother, passing thee,
Should feel a throb of thy foreboding pain,
And think--"My child at home clings so to me,
With the same smile . . . and yet in vain, in vain,
Since even this Jesus died on Calvary"--
Say to her then: "He also rose again."
THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI.
ILARIA, thou that wert so fair and dear
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: destroyed within a radius of thirty miles, and the land was as bare of
black men as a child's hand of hair; and even the beasts seemed to have
vanished.
In the shade of the tent, formed of the canvas across two posts, lay three
white men, whose work it was to watch the pots and guard the camp. They
were all three Colonial Englishmen, and lay on the ground on their
stomachs, passing the time by carrying on a desultory conversation, or
taking a few whiffs, slowly, and with care, from their pipes, for tobacco
was precious in the camp.
Under some bushes a few yards off lay a huge trooper, whose nationality was
uncertain, but who was held to hail from some part of the British Isles,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: harbour, and the sea-bottom thus stored with treasures scraped up
from deeper water in every direction for miles and miles.
Hastings is, I fear, but a poor spot for dredging. Its friable
cliffs and strong tides produce a changeable and barren sea-floor.
Yet the immense quantities of Flustra thrown up after a storm
indicate dredging ground at no great distance outside; its rocks,
uninteresting as they are compared with our Devonians, have yielded
to the industry and science of M. Tumanowicz a vast number of sea-
weeds and sponges. Those three curious polypes, Valkeria cuscuta
(Plate I. fig. 3), Notamia Bursaria, and Serialaria Lendigera,
abound within tide-marks; and as the place is so much visited by
|