| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: would have made a very domestic man, with a woman who knew how to
manage him."
Now these fair critics, in raising their profound edifice of
domestic felicity, did not recollect that the corner-stone was
wanting, and that to receive good company with good cheer, the
means of the banquet ought to have been furnished by Sir Philip,
whose income (dilapidated as it was) was not equal to the display
of the hospitality required, and at the same time to the supply
of the good knight's MENUS PLAISIRS. So, in spite of all that
was so sagely suggested by female friends, Sir Philip carried his
good-humour everywhere abroad, and left at home a solitary
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: island was protected through those times by the English fleet,
its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure from
the general trouble and spoliation. The storms of many kinds
which shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century
spent their force before they reached those cliffs at so short a
distance from the coast of Andalusia.
If the rumour of the Emperor's name so much as reached the shore
of the island, it is doubtful whether the holy women kneeling in
the cloisters grasped the reality of his dream-like progress of
glory, or the majesty that blazed in flame across kingdom after
kingdom during his meteor life.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: without her.
As soon as the Baroness was in the drawing-room, the cunning old man
stole out through the dressing-closet to the anteroom, and went away,
giving Mariette a slip of paper, on which was written, "Address my
trunks to go by railway to Corbeil--to Monsieur Hector, cloak-room,
Corbeil."
The Baron jumped into a hackney coach, and was rushing across Paris by
the time Mariette came to give the Baroness this note, and say that
her master had gone out. Adeline flew back into her room, trembling
more violently than ever; her children followed on hearing her give a
piercing cry. They found her in a dead faint; and they put her to bed,
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