| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: The violins were weaving a weft of silver,
The horns were weaving a lustrous brede of gold,
And time was caught in a glistening pattern,
Time, too elusive to hold . . .
Shadows of leaves fell over her face,--and sunlight:
She turned her face away.
Nearer she moved to a crouching darkness
With every step and day.
Death, who at first had thought of her only an instant,
At a great distance, across the night,
Smiled from a window upon her, and followed her slowly
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: though true, even to truism. What I wrote about religion, was, on
the contrary, painstaking, and, I think, forcible, as compared with
most religious writing; especially in its frankness and
fearlessness: but it was wholly mistaken: for I had been educated
in the doctrines of a narrow sect, and had read history as obliquely
as sectarians necessarily must.
Mingled among these either unnecessary or erroneous statements, I
find, indeed, some that might be still of value; but these, in my
earlier books, disfigured by affected language, partly through the
desire to be thought a fine writer, and partly, as in the second
volume of 'Modern Painters,' in the notion of returning as far as I
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: father and grandfather, old established princely merchants
of the princely city of Dort, were born.
Mynheer van Baerle the father had amassed in the Indian
trade three or four hundred thousand guilders, which Mynheer
van Baerle the son, at the death of his dear and worthy
parents, found still quite new, although one set of them
bore the date of coinage of 1640, and the other that of
1610, a fact which proved that they were guilders of Van
Baerle the father and of Van Baerle the grandfather; but we
will inform the reader at once that these three or four
hundred thousand guilders were only the pocket money, or
The Black Tulip |
