| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . .
can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: and all things of that kind which they could want. With the help
of those tools they were so very handy that they came at last to
build up their huts or houses very handsomely, raddling or working
it up like basket-work all the way round. This piece of ingenuity,
although it looked very odd, was an exceeding good fence, as well
against heat as against all sorts of vermin; and our men were so
taken with it that they got the Indians to come and do the like for
them; so that when I came to see the two Englishmen's colonies,
they looked at a distance as if they all lived like bees in a hive.
As for Will Atkins, who was now become a very industrious, useful,
and sober fellow, he had made himself such a tent of basket-work as
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: poet has put into the lips of Marion Delorme is infused with truth,--
"And Love remade me virgin."
That line seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so
truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern
theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially
vaudevillist spirit of the pit.
So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded,
hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in
all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in
appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart's legality, which
women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least
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