| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: outshining in her passage the twinkling light of the stars.
She passed over the constellation of the Twins, and was now
nearing the halfway point between the horizon and the zenith.
A terrible silence weighed upon the entire scene! Not a breath of
wind upon the earth! not a sound of breathing from the countless
chests of the spectators! Their hearts seemed afraid to beat!
All eyes were fixed upon the yawning mouth of the Columbiad.
Murchison followed with his eye the hand of his chronometer.
It wanted scarce forty seconds to the moment of departure, but
each second seemed to last an age! At the twentieth there was
a general shudder, as it occurred to the minds of that vast
From the Earth to the Moon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: And a boy, a climber of trees: all the hopes of his house.
Unwary, with open hands, he slept in the midst of his folk,
And dreamed that he heard a voice crying without, and awoke,
Leaping blindly afoot like one from a dream that he fears.
A hellish glow and clouds were about him; - it roared in his ears
Like the sound of the cataract fall that plunges sudden and steep;
And Rahero swayed as he stood, and his reason was still asleep.
Now the flame struck hard on the house, wind-wielded, a fracturing blow,
And the end of the roof was burst and fell on the sleepers below;
And the lofty hall, and the feast, and the prostrate bodies of folk,
Shone red in his eyes a moment, and then were swallowed of smoke.
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: comparison.
Here we see the first of the great serge manufacture of Devonshire-
-a trade too great to be described in miniature, as it must be if I
undertake it here, and which takes up this whole county, which is
the largest and most populous in England, Yorkshire excepted (which
ought to be esteemed three counties, and is, indeed, divided as
such into the East, West, and North Riding). But Devonshire, one
entire county, is so full of great towns, and those towns so full
of people, and those people so universally employed in trade and
manufactures, that not only it cannot be equalled in England, but
perhaps not in Europe.
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