| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: By little love!" forthwith the others cried,
"For ardour in well-doing freshens grace!"
"O folk, in whom an eager fervour now
Supplies perhaps delay and negligence,
Put by you in well-doing, through lukewarmness,
This one who lives, and truly I lie not,
Would fain go up, if but the sun relight us;
So tell us where the passage nearest is."
These were the words of him who was my Guide;
And some one of those spirits said: "Come on
Behind us, and the opening shalt thou find;
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: have some good sense. Look at me! Tell me if I am likely to seduce any
one. I cannot tie my own shoes, nor even stoop. For these twenty years
past, the Lord be praised, I have not dared to put on a pair of stays
under pain of sudden death. I was as thin as an asparagus stalk when I
was seventeen, and pretty too--I may say so now. So I married
Jeanrenaud, a good fellow, and headman on the salt-barges. I had my
boy, who is a fine young man; he is my pride, and it is not holding
myself cheap to say he is my best piece of work. My little Jeanrenaud
was a soldier who did Napoleon credit, and who served in the Imperial
Guard. But, alas! at the death of my old man, who was drowned, times
changed for the worse. I had the smallpox. I was kept two years in my
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On Revenues by Xenophon: bestows on man season by season, one and all they commence earlier and
end later in this land. Nor is the supremacy of Attica shown only in
those products which year after year flourish and grow old, but the
land contains treasures of a more perennial kind. Within its folds
lies imbedded by nature an unstinted store of marble, out of which are
chiselled[4] temples and altars of rarest beauty and the glittering
splendour of images sacred to the gods. This marble, moreover, is an
obejct of desire to many foreigners, Hellenes and barbarians alike.
Then there is land which, although it yields no fruit to the sower,
needs only to be quarried in order to feed many times more mouths than
it could as corn-land. Doubtless we owe it to a divine dispensation
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