| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and
then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or
scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as
Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right
shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth
plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility,
and necessity of deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten
its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions. Give any
newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless,
and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas,
systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute
of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly
obedient to the voice of reason.
There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people.
But the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine
family. Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat
oppressive respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and
the conspicuous, a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle
modified by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and conscientious in
all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same
precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: to invite. He lost himself in the large lustre, which was more and
more what he had from the first wished it to be - as dazzling as
the vision of heaven in the mind of a child. He wandered in the
fields of light; he passed, among the tall tapers, from tier to
tier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the white
intensity of one clear emblem, of one saved soul, to another. It
was in the quiet sense of having saved his souls that his deep
strange instinct rejoiced. This was no dim theological rescue, no
boon of a contingent world; they were saved better than faith or
works could save them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk
from dying to, for actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of
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