| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: these inhospitable regions.
The settlement is situated eighteen miles up the river.
The road follows the foot of the sloping cliff, which forms
the northern boundary of the great valley, in which the Rio
Negro flows. On the way we passed the ruins of some fine
"estancias," which a few years since had been destroyed by
the Indians. They withstood several attacks. A man present
at one gave me a very lively description of what took place.
The inhabitants had sufficient notice to drive all the cattle
and horses into the "corral" [1] which surrounded the house,
and likewise to mount some small cannon. The Indians were
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: admitted never went beyond the first two columns of the long gallery
of the old masters; but in that year, to the great astonishment of the
public, they filled the whole space. Historical, high-art, genre
paintings, easel pictures, landscapes, flowers, animals, and water-
colors,--these eight specialties could surely not offer more than
twenty pictures in one year worthy of the eyes of the public, which,
indeed, cannot give its attention to a greater number of such works.
The more the number of artists increases, the more careful and
exacting the jury of admission ought to be.
The true character of the Salon was lost as soon as it spread along
the galleries. The Salon should have remained within fixed limits of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: I just stopped once and knelt, and twisted back my head in the helmet
and had a look up. It was a most extraordinary bright green-blue above,
and the two canoes and the boat floating there very small and distant
like a kind of twisted H. And it made me feel sick to squint up at it,
and think what the pitching and swaying of the three meant.
"It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness, pressure something awful, like being buried
in sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing
as it seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit,
I found myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another
squint to see if anything was visible of the canoes and boats,
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