| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: thorny bit of business, an expropriation, and he continued to ask for
my advice with as much freedom as if he paid for it.
"My principal was a man of pleasure and expensive tastes; before the
second year (1818-1819) was out he had got himself into difficulties,
and was obliged to sell his practice. A professional connection in
those days did not fetch the present exorbitant prices, and my
principal asked a hundred and fifty thousand francs. Now an active
man, of competent knowledge and intelligence, might hope to pay off
the capital in ten years, paying interest and living respectably in
the meantime--if he could command confidence. But I as the seventh
child of a small tradesman at Noyon, I had not a sou to my name, nor
Gobseck |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: regarding these people, to whom we owe an immeasurable responsibility, is
to see the best that is in them prevail. Discord over this seems on the
wane, and sane views gaining. The issue sits on all our shoulders, but
local variations call for a sliding scale of policy. So admirably
dispassionate a novel as The Elder Brother, by Mr. Jervey. forwards the
understanding of Northerners unfamiliar with the South, and also that
friendliness between the two places, which is retarded chiefly by
tactless newspapers.
Ah, tact should have been one of the cardinal virtues; and if I didn't
possess a spice of it myself, I should here thank by name certain two
members of the St. Michael family of Kings Port for their patience with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: fifty
to nearly two hundred feet. Were they simply a line of cliffs,
they
might not, so far as relates to height or extent, be worthy of a
rank among great natural curiosities, although such an assemblage
of
rocky strata, washed by the waves of the great lake, would not,
under any circumstances, be destitute of grandeur. To the
voyager,
coasting along their base in his frail canoe, they would, at all
times, be an object of dread; the recoil of the surf, the
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