| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: miserable and perfectly healthy, which disposes of the ugly
notion that has at times disturbed me that my happiness
here is less due to the garden than to a good digestion.
And while we were wasting our lives there, here was
this dear place with dandelions up to the very door,
all the paths grass-grown and completely effaced, in winter
so lonely, with nobody but the north wind taking the least
notice of it, and in May--in all those five lovely Mays--
no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more
wonderful masses of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing,
the virginia creeper <6> madder every year, until at last,
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: accuracy and expression.
This Festa gave us a fine chance to see the people of the Ampezzo
all together. It was the annual jubilation of the district; and
from all the outlying hamlets and remote side valleys, even from
the neighbouring vales of Agordo and Auronzo, across the mountains,
and from Cadore, the peasants, men and women and children, had come
in to the Sagro at Cortina. The piazza--which is really nothing
more than a broadening of the road behind the church--was quite
thronged. There must have been between two and three thousand
people.
The ceremonies of the day began with general church-going. The
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: avidity upon details that possess all the piquancy of novelty, thus
establishing yet once again the trust of the well-known axiom, that
there is nothing so little known as that which everybody is supposed
to know--the Law of the Land, to wit.
And of a truth, for the immense majority of Frenchmen, a minute
description of some part of the machinery of banking will be as
interesting as any chapter of foreign travel. When a tradesman living
in one town gives a bill to another tradesman elsewhere (as David was
supposed to have done for Lucien's benefit), the transaction ceases to
be a simple promissory note, given in the way of business by one
tradesman to another in the same place, and becomes in some sort a
|
