| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: dressed. It was, in fact, the devoted affection of the lower
classes, the love of a girl of the people transferred to a
loftier level. Bourgeat did all my errands, woke me at night at
any fixed hour, trimmed my lamp, cleaned our landing; as good as
a servant as he was as a father, and as clean as an English girl.
He did all the housework. Like Philopoemen, he sawed our wood,
and gave to all he did the grace of simplicity while preserving
his dignity, for he seemed to understand that the end ennobles
every act.
"When I left this good fellow, to be house surgeon at the Hotel-
Dieu, I felt an indescribable, dull pain, knowing that he could
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: who
walks by night to pilfer corn. It offers, therefore, a kind of
parallelism in expression to the preceding term." -- Oneota, p.
254.
Pugasaing, with thirteen pieces.
This Game of the Bowl is the principal game of hazard among the
Northern tribes of Indians. Mr. Schoolcraft gives a particular
account of it in Oneota, p. 85. "This game," he says, "is very
fascinating to some portions of the Indians. They stake at it
their
ornaments, weapons, clothing, canoes, horses, everything in fact
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the Walrus or
the Carpenter, in the poem, who "wept to see such quantities of
sand"?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter
nothing at all.
The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem
full of merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a
purely spectacular universe, where inspiration of every sort has
a rational existence, the artist of every kind finds a natural
place; and amongst them the poet as the seer par excellence.
Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble and more toilsome
task should be a man with the steeled heart, is worthy of a
 Some Reminiscences |