| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: his bodily infirmities reached a point when the task of laying
him in bed became as difficult as the navigation of a felucca in
the perils of an intricate channel. Then came the day of his
death; and this brilliant sceptic, whose mental faculties alone
had survived the most dreadful of all destructions, found himself
between his two special antipathies--the doctor and the
confessor. But he was jovial with them. Did he not see a light
gleaming in the future beyond the veil? The pall that is like
lead for other men was thin and translucent for him; the light-
footed, irresistible delights of youth danced beyond it like
shadows.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the
actions of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not
speak of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that
to which the Muse impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of
them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral strains,
another epic or iambic verses--and he who is good at one is not good at any
other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power
divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak
not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds
of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy
prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: of conquest with a certain condiment of romantic generosity
and chivalrous self-devotion, with which his imitators
in all other points have found it convenient to dispense.
To give freely to one man what he had taken forcibly from another,
was generosity of which he was very capable; but to restore
what he had taken to the man from whom he had taken it,
was something that wore too much of the cool physiognomy
of justice to be easily reconcileable to his kingly feelings.
He had, besides, not only sent all King Henry's saints
about their business, or rather about their no-business--
their faineantise--but he had laid them under rigorous
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