| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: an admirable suite of reception rooms. An English philanthropist had
built this architectural bijou, designed the garden, added the
greenhouse, polished the doors, bricked the courtyard, painted the
window-frames green, and realized, in short, a dream which resembled
(proportions excepted) George the Fourth's Pavilion at Brighton. The
inventive and industrious Parisian workmen had moulded the doors and
window-frames; the ceilings were imitated from the middle-ages or
those of a Venetian palace; marble veneering abounded on the outer
walls. Steinbock and Francois Souchet had designed the mantel-pieces
and the panels above the doors; Schinner had painted the ceilings in
his masterly manner. The beauties of the staircase, white as a woman's
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso: There shines, and fair adorned was every part
With riches grown by kind, not framed by art:
XLIX
An hundred grooms, quick, diligent and neat,
Attendance gave about these strangers bold,
Against the wall there stood a cupboard great
Of massive plate, of silver, crystal, gold.
But when with precious wines and costly meat
They filled were, thus spake the wizard old:
"Now fits the time, sir knights, I tell and show
What you desire to hear, and long to know.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: conscious of what he was doing.[326]
[326] Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses's and
Isaiah's commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv.,
and Isaiah, chap. vi.
Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of
Alexandria describes his inspiration:--
"Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly
become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me,
and implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence
of divine inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have
known neither the place in which I was, nor those who were
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