| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Harry Houdini: so insupportable that he committed
suicide before he was forty years of age, on
August 10th, 1749.[4]
[4] Interesting accounts of Topham's career may be found
in Wonders of Bodily Strength, New York, 1873, a translation
from the French of Depping, by Charles Russell; Sir David
Brewster's, Letters on Natural Magic; London, 1838; Wanley's
Wonders of the Little World, London, 1806; Wilson's
Wonderful Characters, London, 1821, (but not in the reprint
of 1869).
About the year 1703 there appeared in
Miracle Mongers and Their Methods |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: earthly love are gleams which reveal to certain souls the coming of
joys more durable; just as the discovery of a single law of nature
leads certain privileged beings to a conception of the system of the
universe. Our fleeting happiness here below is the forerunning proof
of another and a perfect happiness, just as the earth, a fragment of
the world, attests the universe. We cannot measure the vast orbit of
the Divine thought of which we are but an atom as small as God is
great; but we can feel its vastness, we can kneel, adore, and wait.
Men ever mislead themselves in science by not perceiving that all
things on their globe are related and co-ordinated to the general
evolution, to a constant movement and production which bring with
Seraphita |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: and when, indeed, one would have thought the very city itself was
running out of the gates, and that there would be nobody left behind;
you may be sure from that hour all trade, except such as related to
immediate subsistence, was, as it were, at a full stop.
This is so lively a case, and contains in it so much of the real
condition of the people, that I think I cannot be too particular in it,
and therefore I descend to the several arrangements or classes of
people who fell into immediate distress upon this occasion. For example:
1. All master-workmen in manufactures, especially such as belonged
to ornament and the less necessary parts of the people's dress, clothes,
and furniture for houses, such as riband-weavers and other weavers,
A Journal of the Plague Year |
