| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Professor by Charlotte Bronte: children."
I have a word to say of Victor ere I shut this manuscript in my
desk--but it must be a brief one, for I hear the tinkle of silver
on porcelain.
Victor is as little of a pretty child as I am of a handsome man,
or his mother of a fine woman; he is pale and spare, with large
eyes, as dark as those of Frances, and as deeply set as mine.
His shape is symmetrical enough, but slight; his health is good.
I never saw a child smile less than he does, nor one who knits
such a formidable brow when sitting over a book that interests
him, or while listening to tales of adventure, peril, or wonder,
The Professor |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: down a California mountain and find Paris at the bottom! The Huguenots,
Rossini, Herold--I was waiting for Il Trovatore."
"Is that something new?" inquired the Padre, eagerly.
The young man gave an exclamation. "The whole world is ringing with it!"
he cried.
"But Santa YsabeI del Mar is a long way from the whole world," murmured
Padre Ignacio.
"Indeed, it would not appear to be so," returned young Gaston. "I think
the Comedie Francaise must be round the corner."
A thrill went through the priest at the theater's name. "And have you
been long in America?" he asked.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains),
not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little
I country'; to his father's fields, `sloping down to the river
and to the old beech trees with broken tops.'
Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi,
must have remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter
fact that he was to leave the `Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed
that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men,
should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind
must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the `Georgics,'
where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow;
My Antonia |
