| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Albert Savarus by Honore de Balzac: Italian, who allowed him to gaze at her for a moment under the
sweetest silence and the sweetest night which ever, perhaps, shone on
this lake, the king of Swiss lakes.
Francesca was quite of the Italian type, and such as imagination
supposes or pictures, or, if you will, dreams, that Italian women are.
What first struck Rodolphe was the grace and elegance of a figure
evidently powerful, though so slender as to appear fragile. An amber
paleness overspread her face, betraying sudden interest, but it did
not dim the voluptuous glance of her liquid eyes of velvety blackness.
A pair of hands as beautiful as ever a Greek sculptor added to the
polished arms of a statue grasped Rodolphe's arm, and their whiteness
Albert Savarus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: impermeable and unfathomable bog--a natural sink in one corner of
it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my
subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than
from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer
parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda
(Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the
earth's surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names
of the shrubs which grow there--the high blueberry, panicled
andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora--all standing in the
quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my
house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other
Walking |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: rights to it. And here at the Lodge she had lived ever since, a
sad and lonely woman, and yet not altogether an unhappy one, for
she gave much of her time to good works. Indeed she told me that
had it not been for the wide lands and moneys which she must manage
as my heiress, she would have betaken herself to a sisterhood,
there to wear her life away in peace, since I being lost to her,
and indeed dead, as she was assured,--for the news of the wreck of
the carak found its way to Ditchingham,--she no longer thought of
marriage, though more than one gentleman of condition had sought
her hand. This, with some minor matters, such as the birth and
death of children, and the story of the great storm and flood that
Montezuma's Daughter |
