| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: The heavy darkness that no dawn will break?
How can they leave me in that dark alone,
Who loved the joy of light and warmth so much,
And thrilled so with the sense of sound and touch, --
How can they shut me underneath a stone?
Anadyomene
The wide, bright temple of the world I found,
And entered from the dizzy infinite
That I might kneel and worship thee in it;
Leaving the singing stars their ceaseless round
Of silver music sound on orbed sound,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: a geyser of water in which were shattered lifeboats, human bodies,
steam, coal, oil, and the flotsam of a liner's deck leaped high
above the surface of the sea--a watery column momentarily marking
the grave of another ship in this greatest cemetery of the seas.
When the turbulent waters had somewhat subsided and the sea had
ceased to spew up wreckage, I ventured to swim back in search of
something substantial enough to support my weight and that of
Nobs as well. I had gotten well over the area of the wreck when
not a half-dozen yards ahead of me a lifeboat shot bow foremost
out of the ocean almost its entire length to flop down upon its
keel with a mighty splash. It must have been carried far below,
The Land that Time Forgot |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: Of late years the Sophists have found an enthusiastic defender in the
distinguished historian of Greece. He appears to maintain (1) that the
term 'Sophist' is not the name of a particular class, and would have been
applied indifferently to Socrates and Plato, as well as to Gorgias and
Protagoras; (2) that the bad sense was imprinted on the word by the genius
of Plato; (3) that the principal Sophists were not the corrupters of youth
(for the Athenian youth were no more corrupted in the age of Demosthenes
than in the age of Pericles), but honourable and estimable persons, who
supplied a training in literature which was generally wanted at the time.
We will briefly consider how far these statements appear to be justified by
facts: and, 1, about the meaning of the word there arises an interesting
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