| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: woman. Extraordinary as this may seem, it is none the less true.
Almost every religious house in the Peninsula, or in Europe for
that matter, was either destroyed or disorganised by the outbreak
of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but as this
island was protected through those times by the English fleet,
its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure from
the general trouble and spoliation. The storms of many kinds
which shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century
spent their force before they reached those cliffs at so short a
distance from the coast of Andalusia.
If the rumour of the Emperor's name so much as reached the shore
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: be sure. However, he decided to let her have it at once
if possible, and took it upstairs for that purpose;
but on reaching the door of her room and looking
in at the keyhole he found there was no light within,
the fact being that Eustacia, without undressing,
had flung herself upon the bed, to rest and gather a
little strength for her coming journey. Her grandfather
concluded from what he saw that he ought not to disturb her;
and descending again to the parlour he placed the letter
on the mantelpiece to give it to her in the morning.
At eleven o'clock he went to bed himself, smoked for
Return of the Native |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: inhabitants in the open air. He and the poet, arm in arm, still
talking together as they went along, proceeded to the spot. It
was a small nook among the hills, with a gray precipice behind,
the stern front of which was relieved by the pleasant foliage of
many creeping plants that made a tapestry for the naked rock, by
hanging their festoons from all its rugged angles. At a small
elevation above the ground, set in a rich framework of verdure,
there appeared a niche, spacious enough to admit a human figure,
with freedom for such gestures as spontaneously accompany earnest
thought and genuine emotion. Into this natural pulpit Ernest
ascended, and threw a look of familiar kindness around upon his
The Snow Image |
