| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: is a small age, and I am of it. I could have wished to be
otherwise busy in this world. I ought to have been able to build
lighthouses and write DAVID BALFOURS too. HINC ILLAE LACRYMAE. I
take my own case as most handy, but it is as illustrative of my
quarrel with the age. We take all these pains, and we don't do as
well as Michael Angelo or Leonardo, or even Fielding, who was an
active magistrate, or Richardson, who was a busy bookseller. J'AI
HONTE POUR NOUS; my ears burn.
I am amazed at the effect which this Chicago exhibition has
produced upon you and others. It set Mrs. Fairchild literally mad
- to judge by her letters. And I wish I had seen anything so
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: am; but there is one service that I would beg of you before all
others. You see me set here on the top of this rock in the midst
of your city. Even with what liberty I have, I have the
opportunity to see a myriad roofs, and I dare to say, thirty
leagues of sea and land. All this hostile! Under all these roofs
my enemies dwell; wherever I see the smoke of a house rising, I
must tell myself that some one sits before the chimney and reads
with joy of our reverses. Pardon me, dear friends, I know that you
must do the same, and I do not grudge at it! With you, it is all
different. Show me your house then, were it only the chimney, or,
if that be not visible, the quarter of the town in which it lies!
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: recall the old Paris of which we speak, and that is soon to disappear;
it stands at the corner of the Petit-Pont, directly opposite to the
guard-house of the Hotel-Dieu.
Formerly each dwelling presented on the river-side the fantastic
appearance given either by the trade of its occupant and his habits,
or by the originality of the exterior constructions invented by the
proprietors to use or abuse the Seine. The bridges being encumbered
with more mills than the necessities of navigation could allow, the
Seine formed as many enclosed basins as there were bridges. Some of
these basins in the heart of old Paris would have offered precious
scenes and tones of color to painters. What a forest of crossbeams
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