| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: ... So the hurricane passed,--tearing off the heads of the
prodigious waves, to hurl them a hundred feet in air,--heaping up
the ocean against the land,--upturning the woods. Bays and
passes were swollen to abysses; rivers regorged; the sea-marshes
were changed to raging wastes of water. Before New Orleans the
flood of the mile-broad Mississippi rose six feet above highest
water-mark. One hundred and ten miles away, Donaldsonville
trembled at the towering tide of the Lafourche. Lakes strove to
burst their boundaries. Far-off river steamers tugged wildly at
their cables,--shivering like tethered creatures that hear by
night the approaching howl of destroyers. Smoke-stacks were
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: body politic. Hemmed in between the Guises who claimed to be the heirs
of Charlemagne and the factious younger branch who sought to screen
the treachery of the Connetable de Bourbon behind the throne,
Catherine, forced to combat heresy which was seeking to annihilate the
monarchy, without friends, aware of treachery among the leaders of the
Catholic party, foreseeing a republic in the Calvinist party,
Catherine employed the most dangerous but the surest weapon of public
policy,--craft. She resolved to trick and so defeat, successively, the
Guises who were seeking the ruin of the house of Valois, the Bourbons
who sought the crown, and the Reformers (the Radicals of those days)
who dreamed of an impossible republic--like those of our time; who
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: as comprehending the loss of a daughter, and a disgrace
never to be wiped off.
Fanny learnt from her all the particulars which had
yet transpired. Her aunt was no very methodical narrator,
but with the help of some letters to and from Sir Thomas,
and what she already knew herself, and could reasonably
combine, she was soon able to understand quite as much
as she wished of the circumstances attending the story.
Mrs. Rushworth had gone, for the Easter holidays,
to Twickenham, with a family whom she had just grown
intimate with: a family of lively, agreeable manners,
Mansfield Park |
