| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: good poets and of Homer, who is the prince of them. In the course of
conversation the admission is elicited from Ion that his skill is
restricted to Homer, and that he knows nothing of inferior poets, such as
Hesiod and Archilochus;--he brightens up and is wide awake when Homer is
being recited, but is apt to go to sleep at the recitations of any other
poet. 'And yet, surely, he who knows the superior ought to know the
inferior also;--he who can judge of the good speaker is able to judge of
the bad. And poetry is a whole; and he who judges of poetry by rules of
art ought to be able to judge of all poetry.' This is confirmed by the
analogy of sculpture, painting, flute-playing, and the other arts. The
argument is at last brought home to the mind of Ion, who asks how this
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou
art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than
a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom
that like a purple thread runs through the texture of DORIAN GRAY;
in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE
SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it
is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make SALOME so like a
piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem
of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that
liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that
abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling: saddle-bags we three rode up Race Street to the Ferry by starlight.
So we went travelling. It's a kindly, softly country there, back of
Philadelphia among the German towns, Lancaster way. Little
houses and bursting big barns, fat cattle, fat women, and all as
peaceful as Heaven might be if they farmed there. Toby sold
medicines out of his saddlebags, and gave the French war-news to
folk along the roads. Him and his long-hilted umberell was as
well known as the stage-coaches. He took orders for that famous
Seneca Oil which he had the secret of from Red Jacket's Indians,
and he slept in friends' farmhouses, but he would shut all the
windows; so Red Jacket and me slept outside. There's nothing to
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