| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lemorne Versus Huell by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard: doctor's prescription she should leave, as ignorant of the peculiar
pleasures of Newport as when she arrived. She had no fancy for its
conglomerate societies, its literary cottages, its parvenue suits
of rooms, its saloon habits, and its bathing herds.
I considered the rides a part of the contract of what was
expected in my two months' performance. I did not dream that I was
enjoying them, any more than I supposed myself to be enjoying a
sea-bath while pulling Aunt Eliza to and fro in the surf. Nothing
in the life around me stirred me, nothing in nature attracted me.
I liked the fog; somehow it seemed to emanate from me instead of
rolling up from the ocean, and to represent me. Whether I went
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: you?'
'To save mine on the cliff yonder. The poor child was with me
looking at the approach of the Puffin steamboat, and I slipped
down. We both had a narrow escape. I wish we had died there!'
'Ah, but wait,' Stephen pleaded with wet eyes. 'She went on that
cliff to see me arrive home: she had promised it. She told me she
would months before. And would she have gone there if she had not
cared for me at all?'
'You have an idea that Elfride died for you, no doubt,' said
Knight, with a mournful sarcasm too nerveless to support itself.
'Never mind. If we find that--that she died yours, I'll say no
A Pair of Blue Eyes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: intended to rival that great work. If genuine, the proper place of the
Menexenus would be at the end of the Phaedrus. The satirical opening and
the concluding words bear a great resemblance to the earlier dialogues; the
oration itself is professedly a mimetic work, like the speeches in the
Phaedrus, and cannot therefore be tested by a comparison of the other
writings of Plato. The funeral oration of Pericles is expressly mentioned
in the Phaedrus, and this may have suggested the subject, in the same
manner that the Cleitophon appears to be suggested by the slight mention of
Cleitophon and his attachment to Thrasymachus in the Republic; and the
Theages by the mention of Theages in the Apology and Republic; or as the
Second Alcibiades seems to be founded upon the text of Xenophon, Mem. A
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