| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: numbers; and Sir William, therefore, on a sudden thought, arresting
our advance.
Before us was the high range of mountains toward which we had been
all day deviously drawing near. From the first light of the dawn,
their silver peaks had been the goal of our advance across a
tumbled lowland forest, thrid with rough streams, and strewn with
monstrous boulders; the peaks (as I say) silver, for already at the
higher altitudes the snow fell nightly; but the woods and the low
ground only breathed upon with frost. All day heaven had been
charged with ugly vapours, in the which the sun swam and glimmered
like a shilling piece; all day the wind blew on our left cheek
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: He accordingly, after three days, took an abrupt leave of the
opulent youth and, crossing the Channel, alighted at the small
hotel, in the quarter of the Champs Elysees, of which Mrs. Moreen
had given him the address. A deep if dumb dissatisfaction with
this lady and her companions bore him company: they couldn't be
vulgarly honest, but they could live at hotels, in velvety
entresols, amid a smell of burnt pastilles, surrounded by the most
expensive city in Europe. When he had left them in Venice it was
with an irrepressible suspicion that something was going to happen;
but the only thing that could have taken place was again their
masterly retreat. "How is he? where is he?" he asked of Mrs.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man
who winked; while the beer-drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets
and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands
across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal
duty attended with embarrassing sadness. At last Mr. Snell, the
landlord, a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof
from human differences as those of beings who were all alike in need
of liquor, broke silence, by saying in a doubtful tone to his cousin
the butcher--
"Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you druv in yesterday,
Bob?"
Silas Marner |
