| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: ever present and ever renewed grief, he related to the marquis at
length the following narrative, which is here condensed, and relieved
of the many digressions made by both the narrator and the listener.
CHAPTER II
THE PASSAGE OF THE BERESINA
Marechal Victor, when he started, about nine at night, from the
heights of Studzianka, which he had defended, as the rear-guard of the
retreating army, during the whole day of November 28th, 1812, left a
thousand men behind him, with orders to protect to the last possible
moment whichever of the two bridges across the Beresina might still
exist. This rear-guard had devoted itself to the task of saving a
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: committed. For in a moment she was on her knees on the floor,
clasping my knees, pressing her wet cheeks to my rough clothes,
crying to me for mercy--for life! life! his life! Oh, it was
horrible! It was horrible to hear her gasping voice, to see her
fair hair falling over my mud-stained boots, to mark her slender
little form convulsed with sobs, to feel that it was a woman, a
gentlewoman, who thus abased herself at my feet!
'Oh, Madame! Madame!' I cried in my pain, 'I beg you to rise.
Rise, or I must go!'
'His life! only his life!' she moaned passionately. 'What had
he done to you--that you should hunt him down? what have we done
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: him up, and went home. But he sent on his sailors toward the
westward, and bound them by a mighty curse - 'Bring back to
me that dark witch-woman, that she may die a dreadful death.
But if you return without her, you shall die by the same
death yourselves.'
So the Argonauts escaped for that time: but Father Zeus saw
that foul crime; and out of the heavens he sent a storm, and
swept the ship far from her course. Day after day the storm
drove her, amid foam and blinding mist, till they knew no
longer where they were, for the sun was blotted from the
skies. And at last the ship struck on a shoal, amid low
|
