| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: which you require in your peers." Thus Modeste Mignon can be of
service to you, and her gold will have the noblest of uses.
As to your servant herself,--you did see her once, at her window.
Yes, "the fairest daughter of Eve the fair" was indeed your
unknown damozel; but how little the Modeste of to-day resembles
her of that long past era! That one was in her shroud, this one--
have I made you know it?--has received from you the life of life.
Love, pure, and sanctioned, the love my father, now returning
rich and prosperous, will authorize, has raised me with its
powerful yet childlike hand from the grave in which I slept. You
have wakened me as the sun wakens the flowers. The eyes of your
Modeste Mignon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: Preparations for a Perilous Voyage.
FIVE days were passed by Mr. Hunt and his companions in the fresh
meadows watered by the bright little mountain stream. The hunters
made great havoc among the buffaloes, and brought in quantities
of meat; the voyageurs busied themselves about the fires,
roasting and stewing for present purposes, or drying provisions
for the journey; the pack-horses, eased of their burdens, rolled
on the grass, or grazed at large about the ample pasture; those
of the party who had no call upon their services, indulged in the
luxury of perfect relaxation, and the camp presented a picture of
rude feasting and revelry, of mingled bustle and repose,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: to promise you will come to HER house as usual.' An interview thus
begun could have but one ending: if the quarrel were the fault of
both, the merit of the reconciliation was entirely Fleeming's.
When our intimacy first began, coldly enough, accidentally enough
on his part, he had still something of the Puritan, something of
the inhuman narrowness of the good youth. It fell from him slowly,
year by year, as he continued to ripen, and grow milder, and
understand more generously the mingled characters of men. In the
early days he once read me a bitter lecture; and I remember leaving
his house in a fine spring afternoon, with the physical darkness of
despair upon my eyesight. Long after he made me a formal
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