| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: though I think I have foreshortened one end of it a little
too much, perhaps. This is very fine and rare; the shape
is exceedingly beautiful and unusual. It has wonderful
decorations on it, but I am not able to reproduce them.
It cost more than the tear-jug, as the dealer said
there was not another plate just like it in the world.
He said there was much false Henri II ware around,
but that the genuineness of this piece was unquestionable.
He showed me its pedigree, or its history, if you please;
it was a document which traced this plate's movements
all the way down from its birth--showed who bought it,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal
to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one
might say, to HIBERNATION. Intramural aestivation, or town-life in
summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or
semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the
last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem:-
AESTIVATION.
AN UNPUBLISHED POEM, BY MY LATE LATIN TUTOR
IN candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Symposium by Xenophon: only natural he should become more studious of virtue. But the
greatest blessing which descends on one beset with eager longing to
convert the idol of his soul into a good man and true friend is this:
necessity is laid upon himself to practise virtue; since how can he
hope to make his comrade good, if he himself works wickedness? Is it
conceivable that the example he himself presents of what is shameless
and incontinent,[53] will serve to make the beloved one temperate and
modest?
[52] Or, "that by largess of beauty he can enthrall his lover."
[53] See Plat. "Symp." 182 A, 192 A.
I have a longing, Callias, by mythic argument[54] to show you that not
The Symposium |
