| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: He rose, and out of slumber calling two
That still had tended on him from his birth,
Before the wakeful mother heard him, went.
The three were clad like tillers of the soil.
Southward they set their faces. The birds made
Melody on branch, and melody in mid air.
The damp hill-slopes were quickened into green,
And the live green had kindled into flowers,
For it was past the time of Easterday.
So, when their feet were planted on the plain
That broadened toward the base of Camelot,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: just indistinctly make out the objects in the room. He saw a
sleeping dais near the center, with a darker blotch of something
lying on the marble floor beside it. He moved a step farther into
the doorway and the scabbard of his sword scraped against the
stone frame. To his horror he saw the sleeping silks and furs
upon the central dais move. He saw a figure slowly arising to a
sitting posture from the death bed of O-Mai the Cruel. His knees
shook, but he gathered all his moral forces, and gripping his
sword more tightly in his trembling fingers prepared to leap
across the chamber upon the horrid apparition. He hesitated just
a moment. He felt eyes upon him--ghoulish eyes that bored through
The Chessmen of Mars |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: suspicion rested on two or three of her intimates, we might say that
one or other of them was the "cavaliere servente"; but it does not.
The lady is a mystery. She is married, though none of us have seen her
husband. Monsieur Firmiani is altogether mythical; he is like that
third post-horse for which we pay though we never behold it. Madame
has the finest contralto voice in Europe, so say judges; but she has
never been heard to sing more than two or three times since she came
to Paris. She receives much company, but goes nowhere."
The Observer speaks, you will notice, as an Oracle. His words,
anecdotes, and quotations must be accepted as truths, under pain of
being thought without social education or intelligence, and of causing
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