| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for
centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made
him what I now saw him--what he was. Such opinions need no
comment, and I will make none.
Our books--the books which, for years, had formed no small
portion of the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be
supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We
pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse
of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and
Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by
Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indagine,
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the
acquisition of it. The more my uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he
took a liking to it!--by the same process and electrical assimilation, as I
told you, through which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by
long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, at length, to get all
be-virtu'd--be-pictured,--be-butterflied, and be-fiddled.
The more my uncle Toby drank of this sweet fountain of science, the greater
was the heat and impatience of his thirst, so that before the first year of
his confinement had well gone round, there was scarce a fortified town in
Italy or Flanders, of which, by one means or other, he had not procured a
plan, reading over as he got them, and carefully collating therewith the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: his heart to thoroughly instruct her, and found his pupil very docile,
as gentle in mind as soft in the flesh, a perfect jewel. Therefore was
he much aggrieved at having so much abridged the lessons by giving it
at Azay, seeing that he would have been quite willing to recommence
it, like all of precentors who say the same thing over and over again
to their pupils.
"Ah! little one," cried the good man, "why did you make so much fuss
that we only came to an understanding close to Azay?"
"Ah!" said she, "I belong to Bellan."
To be brief, I must tell you that when this good man died in his
vicarage there was a great number of people, children and others, who
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
