| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: we may remark, that the thieves' Latin of those days is full of
German words, indicating that its inventors had been employed in
the Continental wars of the time. How that class sprung up, we
may see, I suppose, pretty plainly, from Shakespeare's "Henry the
Fifth." Whether Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph, Doll and Mrs. Quickly,
existed in the reign of Henry the Fifth, they certainly existed in
the reign of Elizabeth. They are probably sketches from life of
people whom Shakespeare had seen in Alsatia and the Mint.
To these merely rascal elements, male and female, we must add, I
fear, those whom mere penury, from sickness, failure, want of
employment drove into dwellings of the lowest order. Such people,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac: government had become a more settled thing, the new authorities, the
prefect of the Aube, Malin's friends, and Malin himself had endeavored
to undermine her in the community. Her preoccupying thought was the
overthrow of Bonaparte, whose ambition and its triumphs excited the
anger of her soul,--a cold, deliberate anger. The obscure and hidden
enemy of a man at the pinnacle of glory, she kept her gaze upon him
from the depths of her valley and her forests, with relentless fixity;
there were times when she thought of killing him in the roads about
Malmaison or Saint-Cloud. Plans for the execution of this idea may
have been the cause of many of her past actions, but having been
initiated, after the peace of Amiens, into the conspiracy of the men
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: cause influenced my mind more than they.
I had at heart a strange and anxious thought. Something had
happened which I could not comprehend; no one knew of or had seen
the event but myself: it had taken place the preceding night. Mr.
Rochester that night was absent from home; nor was he yet returned:
business had called him to a small estate of two or three farms he
possessed thirty miles off--business it was requisite he should
settle in person, previous to his meditated departure from England.
I waited now his return; eager to disburthen my mind, and to seek of
him the solution of the enigma that perplexed me. Stay till he
comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall
Jane Eyre |
