| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Helwyse, advancing three steps into the chamber. "She is not
here! There on yonder table, I behold the sparkle of a diamond
which once she wore upon her bosom. There"--and he
shuddered--"there hangs her mantle, on which a dead woman
embroidered a spell of dreadful potency. But where is the Lady
Eleanore?"
Something stirred within the silken curtains of a canopied bed;
and a low moan was uttered, which, listening intently, Jervase
Helwyse began to distinguish as a woman's voice, complaining
dolefully of thirst. He fancied, even, that he recognized its
tones.
Twice Told Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: For all my world is in your arms,
My sun and stars are you.
April Song
Willow, in your April gown
Delicate and gleaming,
Do you mind in years gone by
All my dreaming?
Spring was like a call to me
That I could not answer,
I was chained to loneliness,
I, the dancer.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Nana, Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille by Emile Zola: had her old ambition been surpassed. Once again she tasted the
novel sensations experienced by chits of girls, and at night when
she went upstairs, dizzy with her day in the open air and
intoxicated by the scent of green leaves, and rejoined her Zizi
behind the curtain, she fancied herself a schoolgirl enjoying a
holiday escapade. It was an amour, she thought, with a young cousin
to whom she was going to be married. And so she trembled at the
slightest noise and dread lest parents should hear her, while making
the delicious experiments and suffering the voluptuous terrors
attendant on a girl's first slip from the path of virtue.
Nana in those days was subject to the fancies a sentimental girl
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