| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: It is disquieting, indeed, to find our acts so spied upon,
and the most private known. But is this new? Have we not
long feared and suspected every blade of grass?'
'Ay, and our shadows!' cried my father. 'But all this is
nothing. Here is the letter that accompanied the list.'
I heard my mother turn the pages, and she was some time
silent.
'I see,' she said at last; and then, with the tone of one
reading: '"From a believer so largely blessed by Providence
with this world's goods,"' she continued, '"the Church awaits
in confidence some signal mark of piety." There lies the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: physical and mental, was so admirably balanced, that it had no doubt
been able to resist the demands on his strength. The excitement to
which he had been wound up by the anticipation of acute physical
enjoyment, enhanced by a chaste life and a highly-strung soul, had no
doubt led to these attacks, of which the results are as little known
as the cause.
The letters that have by chance escaped destruction show very plainly
a transition from pure idealism to the most intense sensualism.
Time was when Lambert and I had admired this phenomenon of the human
mind, in which he saw the fortuitous separation of our two natures,
and the signs of a total removal of the inner man, using its unknown
Louis Lambert |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: there!"
"She is certainly there! Tomorrow she will be mine," he said
to himself, and joy blended with the slow tinkling of a bell that
began to ring.
Strange unaccountable workings of the heart! The nun, wasted by
yearning love, worn out with tears and fasting, prayer and
vigils; the woman of nine-and-twenty, who had passed through
heavy trials, was loved more passionately than the lighthearted
girl, the woman of four-and-twenty, the sylphide, had ever been.
But is there not, for men of vigorous character, something
attractive in the sublime expression engraven on women's faces by
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