| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: more happily circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere
more ostentatious than at Edinburgh. I have mentioned
already how, to the stroller along Princes Street, the
High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is
true, there is a garden between. And although nothing
could be more glaring by way of contrast, sometimes the
opposition is more immediate; sometimes the thing lies in
a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of grass
between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge
and see the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to
view one rank of society from another in the twinkling of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Then the mother rejoin'd:--"You're wrong, dear Hermann, to harbour
Angry feelings against the children, for they are but children.
Minnie's an excellent girl, and has a tenderness for you;
Lately she ask'd how you were. Indeed, I wish you would choose her!"
Then the son thoughtfully answer'd:--"I know not why, but the fact is
My annoyance has graven itself in my mind, and hereafter
I could not bear at the piano to see her, or list to her singing."
But the father sprang up, and said, in words full of anger
"Little comfort you give me, in truth! I always have said it,
When you took pleasure in horses, and cared for nothing but fieldwork;
That which the servants of prosperous people perform as their duty,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: the more undeniably since we find that, in our current
doctrines, they have swallowed up the others and are thought
to conclude in themselves all the worthy parts of man.
These, then, must also be suffered to affect conduct in the
practical domain, much or little according as they are
forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.
Now, a man's view of the universe is mostly a view of the
civilised society in which he lives. Other men and women are
so much more grossly and so much more intimately palpable to
his perceptions, that they stand between him and all the
rest; they are larger to his eye than the sun, he hears them
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