| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: and "The Paradise," was begun long before the first, and as early
as the year 1797; but, owing to many interruptions, not concluded
till the summer before last. On a retrospect of the time and
exertions that have been thus employed, I do not regard those
hours as the least happy of my life, during which (to use the
eloquent language of Mr. Coleridge) "my individual recollections
have been suspended, and lulled to sleep amid the music of nobler
thoughts;" nor that study as misapplied, which has familiarized
me with one of the sublimest efforts of the human invention.
To those, who shall be at the trouble of examining into the
degree of accuracy with which the task has been executed, I may
 The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: property hinders Individualism at every step.' It is to be noted
that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily
good, or wealthy people necessarily bad. That would not have been
true. Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished
people, more moral, more intellectual, more well-behaved. There is
only one class in the community that thinks more about money than
the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing
else. That is the misery of being poor. What Jesus does say is
that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even
through what he does, but entirely through what he is. And so the
wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso: With each wind blasted, spoiled with every shower.
LXIV
" `But let your happy souls in joy possess
The ivory castles of your bodies fair,
Your passed harms salve with forgetfulness,
Haste not your coming evils with thought and care,
Regard no blazing star with burning tress,
Nor storm, nor threatening sky, nor thundering air,
This wisdom is, good life, and worldly bliss,
Kind teacheth us, nature commands us this.'
LXV
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