| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished
elements in a general effect. But the first class of writers
have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in
which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero
is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne:
it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in
the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of
intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three first are but
infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular
point of literary art, excels his superior in the whole.
What is that point?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: petitions for pardon for the errors of the day, and refreshing
sleep through the night and strength for the morrow. It is good to
be in a land where the people are not ashamed to pray. I have
shared the blessing of Catholics at their table in lowly huts among
the mountains of the Tyrol, and knelt with Covenanters at their
household altar in the glens of Scotland; and all around the world,
where the spirit of prayer is, there is peace. The genius of the
Scotch has made many contributions to literature, but none I think,
more precious, and none that comes closer to the heart, than the
prayer which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote for his family in distant
Samoa, the night before he died:--
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: clear, he could not look his wife straight in the face, did not
smile with delight when he met her, and to avoid being left alone
with her, he often brought in to dinner his colleague,
Korostelev, a little close-cropped man with a wrinkled face, who
kept buttoning and unbuttoning his reefer jacket with
embarrassment when he talked with Olga Ivanovna, and then with
his right hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two
doctors talked about the fact that a displacement of the
diaphragm was sometimes accompanied by irregularities of the
heart, or that a great number of neurotic complaints were met
with of late, or that Dymov had the day before found a cancer of
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