| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: those fractions, which are drops in the reckoning of every year,
shall amount to so large a portion of time, that January shall be
no more a winter month." By this periphrasis is meant " in a
short time," as we say familiarly, such a thing will happen
before a thousand years are over when we mean, it will happen
soon.
v. 135. Fortune shall be fain.] The commentators in general
suppose that our Poet here augurs that great reform, which he
vainly hoped would follow on the arrival of the Emperor Henry
VII. in Italy. Lombardi refers the prognostication to Can Grande
della Scala: and, when we consider that this Canto was not
The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: God said, "Where will you go?"
I said "To the earth from which I came; it was better there."
And God laughed at me; and I wondered why he laughed.
God said, "Come, and I will show you Heaven."
...
And partly I awoke. It was still and dark; the sound of the carriages had
died in the street; the woman who laughed was gone; and the policeman's
tread was heard no more. In the dark it seemed as if a great hand lay upon
my heart, and crushed it. I tried to breathe and tossed from side to side;
and then again I fell asleep, and dreamed.
God took me to the edge of that world. It ended. I looked down. The
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's "History of New England
Witchcraft," in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently
believed.
He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and
simple credulity. His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers
of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been
increased by his residence in this spell-bound region. No tale
was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was
often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the
afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering
the little brook that whimpered by his school-house, and there
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
