| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: tugged through that chapter, the book shall not be opened again this
twelve-month.--Huzza!--
Chapter 3.XLII.
--Five years with a bib under his chin;
Four years in travelling from Christ-cross-row to Malachi;
A year and a half in learning to write his own name;
Seven long years and more (Greek)-ing it, at Greek and Latin;
Four years at his probations and his negations--the fine statue still lying
in the middle of the marble block,--and nothing done, but his tools
sharpened to hew it out!--'Tis a piteous delay!--Was not the great Julius
Scaliger within an ace of never getting his tools sharpened at all?--Forty-
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: Bachelor of Arts. I print the legend partly to refresh
my own memory, too, for I have never read it before.
THE LEGEND
Lore (two syllables) was a water nymph who used to sit
on a high rock called the Ley or Lei (pronounced like our
word LIE) in the Rhine, and lure boatmen to destruction
in a furious rapid which marred the channel at that spot.
She so bewitched them with her plaintive songs and her
wonderful beauty that they forgot everything else to gaze
up at her, and so they presently drifted among the broken
reefs and were lost.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: pursuers passed away to my left. In one place three strange, pink,
hopping animals, about the size of cats, bolted before my footsteps.
This pathway ran up hill, across another open space covered
with white incrustation, and plunged into a canebrake again.
Then suddenly it turned parallel with the edge of a steep-walled gap,
which came without warning, like the ha-ha of an English park,--
turned with an unexpected abruptness. I was still running with all
my might, and I never saw this drop until I was flying headlong through
the air.
I fell on my forearms and head, among thorns, and rose with a torn
ear and bleeding face. I had fallen into a precipitous ravine,
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
