| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: sombre gesture. "There is no devotion like the devotion which obeys in
friendship, and does not stop to weigh motives. In that man you
possess a true friend."
"I will give him you, if you like," she answered; "he will serve you
with the same devotion that he has for me, if I so instruct him."
She waited for a word of recognition, and went on with an accent
replete with tenderness:
"Adolphe, give me then one kind word! . . . It is nearly day."
Henri did not answer. The young man had one sorry quality, for one
considers as something great everything which resembles strength, and
often men invent extravagances. Henri knew not how to pardon. That
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: meet again; and therefore each pronounces his own sentence on the
piece. If the effect of democracy is generally to question the
authority of all literary rules and conventions, on the stage it
abolishes them altogether, and puts in their place nothing but
the whim of each author and of each public.
The drama also displays in an especial manner the truth of
what I have said before in speaking more generally of style and
art in democratic literature. In reading the criticisms which
were occasioned by the dramatic productions of the age of Louis
XIV, one is surprised to remark the great stress which the public
laid on the probability of the plot, and the importance which was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen: him from me!"
And the old man--it was Death himself--he nodded so strangely, it could just
as well signify yes as no. And the mother looked down in her lap, and the
tears ran down over her cheeks; her head became so heavy--she had not closed
her eyes for three days and nights; and now she slept, but only for a minute,
when she started up and trembled with cold.
"What is that?" said she, and looked on all sides; but the old man was gone,
and her little child was gone--he had taken it with him; and the old clock in
the corner burred, and burred, the great leaden weight ran down to the floor,
bump! and then the clock also stood still.
But the poor mother ran out of the house and cried aloud for her child.
Fairy Tales |
