| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: are, the best representations, licking Shakespeare.
What an inconceivable cheese is Alfred de Musset! His comedies
are, to my view, the best work of France this century: a large
order. Did you ever read them? They are real, clear, living work.
- Ever yours,
R. L. S.
Letter: TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
PARIS, 44 BD. HAUSSMANN, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1878.
MY DEAR PEOPLE, - Do you know who is my favourite author just now?
How are the mighty fallen! Anthony Trollope. I batten on him; he
is so nearly wearying you, and yet he never does; or rather, he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: But I kept my smile and my directness. "No more a Southerner than a
Northerner."
"Pray what, then?"
"An American."
She was silent.
"It's the 'sacred trust'--for me."
She was still silent.
"If my state seceded from the Union tomorrow, I should side with the
Union against her."
She was frankly astonished now. "Would you really?" And I think some
light about me began to reach her. A Northerner willing to side against a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: leaving naught for the imagination to desire. Heaven and earth were on
fire.
The silence was awful in its wild and terrible majesty. Infinity,
immensity, closed in upon the soul from every side. Not a cloud in the
sky, not a breath in the air, not a flaw on the bosom of the sand,
ever moving in diminutive waves; the horizon ended as at sea on a
clear day, with one line of light, definite as the cut of a sword.
The Provencal threw his arms round the trunk of one of the palm trees,
as though it were the body of a friend, and then, in the shelter of
the thin, straight shadow that the palm cast upon the granite, he
wept. Then sitting down he remained as he was, contemplating with
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