| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: Upon thy side, against myself I'll fight,
And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn.
With mine own weakness, being best acquainted,
Upon thy part I can set down a story
Of faults conceal'd, wherein I am attainted;
That thou in losing me shalt win much glory:
And I by this will be a gainer too;
For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,
The injuries that to myself I do,
Doing thee vantage, double-vantage me.
Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: part of Goethe's Faust or Ibsen's Emperor or Galilean.
Here, then, Shakespear had a real grievance; and though it is a
sentimental exaggeration to describe him as a broken-hearted man in
the face of the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry
in his latest plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work
could reach success only when carried on the back of a very
fascinating actor who was enormously overcharging his part, and that
the serious plays which did not contain parts big enough to hold the
overcharge were left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact
that Shakespear did not end his life in a glow of enthusiastic
satisfaction with mankind and with the theatre, which is all that Mr
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: with a pewter spoon. But mark how luxury will enter families,
and make a progress, in spite of principle: being call'd one morning
to breakfast, I found it in a China bowl, with a spoon of silver!
They had been bought for me without my knowledge by my wife,
and had cost her the enormous sum of three-and-twenty shillings,
for which she had no other excuse or apology to make, but that she
thought her husband deserv'd a silver spoon and China bowl as well
as any of his neighbors. This was the first appearance of plate
and China in our house, which afterward, in a course of years,
as our wealth increas'd, augmented gradually to several hundred pounds
in value.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
