| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: lesser Hippias contain discussions of the Poets, which offer a parallel to
the ironical criticism of Simonides, and are conceived in a similar spirit.
The affinity of the Protagoras to the Meno is more doubtful. For there,
although the same question is discussed, 'whether virtue can be taught,'
and the relation of Meno to the Sophists is much the same as that of
Hippocrates, the answer to the question is supplied out of the doctrine of
ideas; the real Socrates is already passing into the Platonic one. At a
later stage of the Platonic philosophy we shall find that both the paradox
and the solution of it appear to have been retracted. The Phaedo, the
Gorgias, and the Philebus offer further corrections of the teaching of the
Protagoras; in all of them the doctrine that virtue is pleasure, or that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: Gevaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I began to
think of him with sympathy.
Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the bog, and got into
another wood and upon a well-marked road. It grew darker and
darker. Modestine, suddenly beginning to smell mischief, bettered
the pace of her own accord, and from that time forward gave me no
trouble. It was the first sign of intelligence I had occasion to
remark in her. At the same time, the wind freshened into half a
gale, and another heavy discharge of rain came flying up out of the
north. At the other side of the wood I sighted some red windows in
the dusk. This was the hamlet of Fouzilhic; three houses on a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: slender and fair like his mother, from whom he obtained his blue eyes
and pale skin, smiled from the window on the crowd, and jumped lightly
down to kiss his mother. A short sketch of the young fellow will show
how proud Zelie felt when she saw him.
He wore very elegant boots, trousers of white English drilling held
under his feet by straps of varnished leather, a rich cravat,
admirably put on and still more admirably fastened, a pretty fancy
waistcoat, in the pocket of said waistcoat a flat watch, the chain of
which hung down; and, finally, a short frock-coat of blue cloth, and a
gray hat,--but his lack of the manner-born was shown in the gilt
buttons of the waistcoat and the ring worn outside of his purple kid
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