| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: And press, and fling you down . . . and then forget.
Who plays for me? What sudden drums keep time
To the ecstatic rhythm of my crime?
What flute shrills out as moonlight strikes the floor? . .
What violin so faintly cries
Seeing how strangely in the moon he lies? . . .
The room grows dark once more,
The crack of white light narrows around the door,
And all is silent, except a slow complaining
Of flutes and violins, like music waning.
Take my hand, then, walk with me
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: arisen; but it was still too small and too low down in heaven to
contend with the immense host of lesser luminaries; and the rough
face of the earth was drenched with starlight. Down one of the
alleys, which widened as it receded, he could see a part of the
lamplit terrace where a sentry silently paced, and beyond that a
corner of the town with interlacing street-lights. But all around
him the young trees stood mystically blurred in the dim shine; and
in the stock-still quietness the upleaping god appeared alive.
In this dimness and silence of the night, Otto's conscience became
suddenly and staringly luminous, like the dial of a city clock. He
averted the eyes of his mind, but the finger rapidly travelling,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: thesis admirably argued not long since at the Sorbonne.
The stranger looked down from his raised position on the crowd below
with that deep glance that held a whole poem of sorrow, and those who
met his eye felt an indescribable thrill. The lad, following the old
man, sat down on one of the steps, leaning against the pulpit in a
graceful and melancholy attitude. The silence was now profound, and
the doorway and even the street were blocked by scholars who had
deserted the other classes.
Doctor Sigier was to-day to recapitulate, in the last of a series of
discourses, the views he had set forth in the former lectures on the
Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell. His strange doctrine responded to the
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