| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: Anne Page's gown. As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises
the instances are almost numberless. Posthumus hides his passion
under a peasant's garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot's
rags; Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired
in 'all points as a man'; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen
to the Youth Fidele; Jessica flees from her father's house in boy's
dress, and Julia ties up her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots,
and dons hose and doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a
shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim; Prince Hal and Poins appear
first as footpads in buckram suits, and then in white aprons and
leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as for Falstaff,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: may be her love, is afraid of arriving at the end so promptly, and
face to face with the necessity of giving herself, which to many women
is equivalent to a fall into an abyss, at the bottom of which they
know not what they shall find. The involuntary coldness of the woman
contrasts with her confessed passion, and necessarily reacts upon the
most passionate lover. Thus ideas, which often float around souls like
vapors, determine in them a sort of temporary malady. In the sweet
journey which two beings undertake through the fair domains of love,
this moment is like a waste land to be traversed, a land without a
tree, alternatively damp and warm, full of scorching sand, traversed
by marshes, which leads to smiling groves clad with roses, where Love
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: WEDNESDAY. - I stayed on Duddingston to-day till after nightfall.
The little booths that hucksters set up round the edge were marked
each one by its little lamp. There were some fires too; and the
light, and the shadows of the people who stood round them to warm
themselves, made a strange pattern all round on the snow-covered
ice. A few people with torches began to travel up and down the
ice, a lit circle travelling along with them over the snow. A
gigantic moon rose, meanwhile, over the trees and the kirk on the
promontory, among perturbed and vacillating clouds.
The walk home was very solemn and strange. Once, through a broken
gorge, we had a glimpse of a little space of mackerel sky, moon-
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