| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: years; what a chance for a judicial blunder! 'But no,' thought
Morris, 'they cannot, they dare not, make it murder. Not that.
But honestly, and speaking as a man to a man, I don't see any
other crime in the calendar (except arson) that I don't seem
somehow to have committed. And yet I'm a perfectly respectable
man, and wished nothing but my due. Law is a pretty business.'
With this conclusion firmly seated in his mind, Morris Finsbury
descended to the hall of the house in John Street, still
half-shaven. There was a letter in the box; he knew the
handwriting: John at last!
'Well, I think I might have been spared this,' he said bitterly,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: theatre she never mounts higher than the second tier, excepting at the
Italiens. You can there watch at your leisure the studied
deliberateness of her movements. The enchanting deceiver plays off all
the little political artifices of her sex so naturally as to exclude
all idea of art or premeditation. If she has a royally beautiful hand,
the most perspicacious beholder will believe that it is absolutely
necessary that she should twist, or refix, or push aside the ringlet
or curl she plays with. If she has some dignity of profile, you will
be persuaded that she is giving irony or grace to what she says to her
neighbor, sitting in such a position as to produce the magical effect
of the 'lost profile,' so dear to great painters, by which the cheek
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: All were subdued and low as the murmurs of love, and the great
sun
Looked with the eye of love through the golden vapors around him;
While arrayed in its robes of russet and scarlet and yellow,
Bright with the sheen of the dew, each glittering tree of the
forest
Flashed like the plane-tree the Persian adorned with mantles and
jewels.
Now recommenced the reign of rest and affection and stillness.
Day with its burden and heat had departed, and twilight
descending
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