| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: think of you for so doing. But if you can read into the heart of
these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear
to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and
can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural
life, - which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of
your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.
May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your
own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which
it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance, - may I beg
of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the BRACKETS which
enclose certain paragraphs? I want my "asides," you see, to
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: intellectual) it has immeasurably expanded! If machinery and the command
of inanimate motor-forces have rendered of comparatively little value the
male's mere physical motor-power, the demand upon his intellectual
faculties, the call for the expenditure of nervous energy, and the exercise
of delicate manipulative skill in the labour of human life, have
immeasurably increased.
In a million new directions forms of honoured and remunerative social
labour are opening up before the feet of the modern man, which his
ancestors never dreamed of; and day by day they yet increase in numbers and
importance. The steamship, the hydraulic lift, the patent road-maker, the
railway-train, the electric tram-car, the steam-driven mill, the Maxim gun
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 1492 by Mary Johntson: in the maps of our descendants! Then ships will say, `Now
here is the river so and so,' as to-day the horseman says,
`Here is the Tagus, or the Guadalquiver!' ''
Another thing he said was that to his mind all the islands
that we had found in six years, from San Salvador to Cubagua,
had once been joined together. Land from this shore
to Cuba and beyond. So the peoples were scattered.
He talked to us much upon this voyage of the great earth
and the shape of it, and its destinies; of the stars, the needle,
the Great Circle and the lesser ones, and the Ocean. He
had our time's learning, gained through God knows how
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