| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: but one fact clear in his cloudy, faltering perception,--that
above him the man lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than
death on him to-morrow. Up and down, aimlessly, with his
stoker's torch in hand, going over the years gone and the years
to come, with the dead hatred through all of the pitiless man
above him,--with now and then, perhaps, a pleasanter thought of
things that had been warm and cheerful in his life,--of the
corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in "th'
Alabam',"--of the scow his young master gave him once, the first
thing he really owned: he was almost as proud of it as he was of
Lois when she was born. Most of all remembering the good times
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: Now, on the morning of the very day when Madame de Saint-Esteve had
prophesied success to Victorin, Carabine had said to du Tillet at
about seven o'clock:
"If you want to be very nice, you will give me a dinner at the /Rocher
de Cancale/ and bring Combabus. We want to know, once for all, whether
he has a mistress.--I bet that he has, and I should like to win."
"He is still at the Hotel des Princes; I will call," replied du
Tillet. "We will have some fun. Ask all the youngsters--the youngster
Bixiou, the youngster Lora, in short, all the clan."
At half-past seven that evening, in the handsomest room of the
restaurant where all Europe has dined, a splendid silver service was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil: When girded with the quiver! Media yields
The bitter juices and slow-lingering taste
Of the blest citron-fruit, than which no aid
Comes timelier, when fierce step-dames drug the cup
With simples mixed and spells of baneful power,
To drive the deadly poison from the limbs.
Large the tree's self in semblance like a bay,
And, showered it not a different scent abroad,
A bay it had been; for no wind of heaven
Its foliage falls; the flower, none faster, clings;
With it the Medes for sweetness lave the lips,
Georgics |
