| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: with what had occurred. At Elizabeth-Jane mentioning how
greatly Lucetta had been jeopardized, he exhibited an
agitation different in kind no less than in intensity from
any she had seen in him before. He became so absorbed in
the circumstance that he scarcely had sufficient knowledge
of what he was doing to think of helping her up beside him.
"She has gone on with Mr. Henchard, you say?" he inquired at
last.
"Yes. He is taking her home. They are almost there by this
time."
"And you are sure she can get home?"
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: alone;' or 'the saying of wiser men than ourselves that a man of sense
should try to please not his fellow-servants, but his good and noble
masters,' like St. Paul again; or the description of the 'heavenly
originals'...
The chief criteria for determining the date of the Dialogue are (1) the
ages of Lysias and Isocrates; (2) the character of the work.
Lysias was born in the year 458; Isocrates in the year 436, about seven
years before the birth of Plato. The first of the two great rhetoricians
is described as in the zenith of his fame; the second is still young and
full of promise. Now it is argued that this must have been written in the
youth of Isocrates, when the promise was not yet fulfilled. And thus we
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: less clearly does our future stand out to us in mirage. What we
would be seems as realizable as what we were. Seen by another
beside ourselves, our castles in the air take on something of the
substance of stereoscopic sight. Our airiest fancies seem solid
facts for their reality to her, and gilded by lovelight, they
glitter and sparkle like a true palace of the East. For once all is
possible; nothing lies beyond our reach. And as we talk, and she
listens, we two seem to be floating off into an empyrean of our own
like the summer clouds above our heads, as they sail dreamily on
into the far-away depths of the unfathomable sky.
It would be more than mortal not to believe in ourselves when
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