| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: preacher, going about his business in the hideous respectability of
a high silk hat and a long black coat. How good it is to see him
now in the freedom of a flannel shirt and a broad-brimmed gray felt
with flies stuck around the band.
In Professor John Wilson's Essays Critical and Imaginative, there
is a brilliant description of a bishop fishing, which I am sure is
drawn from the life: "Thus a bishop, sans wig and petticoat, in a
hairy cap, black jacket, corduroy breeches and leathern leggins,
creel on back and rod in hand, sallying from his palace, impatient
to reach a famous salmon-cast ere the sun leave his cloud, . . .
appears not only a pillar of his church, but of his kind, and in
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: The queen fixed her gaze upon a plump young maiden.
Her victim tried to turn away, hiding her face in her
hands and kneeling behind a woman; but the reptile,
with unblinking eyes, stared on with such fixity that I
could have sworn her vision penetrated the woman,
and the girl's arms to reach at last the very center of
her brain.
Slowly the reptile's head commenced to move to and fro,
but the eyes never ceased to bore toward the frightened girl,
and then the victim responded. She turned wide,
fear-haunted eyes toward the Mahar queen, slowly she rose
At the Earth's Core |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: other world who understood you?"
"Not wholly--not as you and I understand each other."
"Then you feel it, too? Oh, I am happy," she sighed.
They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon the
shimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into
sapphirine space, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the
threshold, heard now and then a floating fragment of their talk
blown backward like the stray swallows which the wind sometimes
separates from their migratory tribe.
"Did you never feel at sunset--"
"Ah, yes; but I never heard anyone else say so. Did you?"
|
