| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: example, are we to attribute his tripartite division of the soul to the
gods? Or is this merely assigned to them by way of parallelism with men?
The latter is the more probable; for the horses of the gods are both white,
i.e. their every impulse is in harmony with reason; their dualism, on the
other hand, only carries out the figure of the chariot. Is he serious,
again, in regarding love as 'a madness'? That seems to arise out of the
antithesis to the former conception of love. At the same time he appears
to intimate here, as in the Ion, Apology, Meno, and elsewhere, that there
is a faculty in man, whether to be termed in modern language genius, or
inspiration, or imagination, or idealism, or communion with God, which
cannot be reduced to rule and measure. Perhaps, too, he is ironically
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: kind to me, how she must have liked you!"--though he caught
himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to transmit
them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was
unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the
one drawback to his new situation that it might develop good
things which it would be impossible to hand on to Margaret
Vervain.
The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend's
powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his
distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning
down her street instead of going on to the club. He would show
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells: the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes and
entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace,
to Glastonbury to see what there was to see of a marsh
village the Celts had made for themselves three or four
hundred years before the Romans came. And at Glastonbury also
there were the ruins of a great Benedictine church and abbey
that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence they would go on to
Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine and
sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the
story of Europe right up to Reformation times.
"That will be a good day for us," said Sir Richmond. "It will
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