| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: grinning and leering on chimney-pieces, in front of beautifully
figured hand-screens; porcelain dinner-sets, gleaming behind
the glass doors of mahogany buffets; large screens, in corners,
covered with tense silk and embroidered with mandarins and dragons.
These things were scattered all over the house, and they
gave Eugenia a pretext for a complete domiciliary visit.
She liked it, she enjoyed it; she thought it a very nice place.
It had a mixture of the homely and the liberal, and though it
was almost a museum, the large, little-used rooms were as fresh
and clean as a well-kept dairy. Lizzie Acton told her that she dusted
all the pagodas and other curiosities every day with her own hands;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: was in his house to question me concerning the race and lineage
of all the Argives. How would it not grieve him could he hear of
them as now quailing before Hector? Many a time would he lift his
hands in prayer that his soul might leave his body and go down
within the house of Hades. Would, by father Jove, Minerva, and
Apollo, that I were still young and strong as when the Pylians
and Arcadians were gathered in fight by the rapid river Celadon
under the walls of Pheia, and round about the waters of the river
Iardanus. The godlike hero Ereuthalion stood forward as their
champion, with the armour of King Areithous upon his shoulders--
Areithous whom men and women had surnamed 'the Mace-man,' because
The Iliad |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten
the war which was always really at loading point.
Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes
of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves.
Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling
full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this
beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks,
green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless
perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were
themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly.
Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which,
Dracula |
