| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: seen where his surcoat hung open, a priest would have hailed him as a
brother. Though of no more than middle height, he appeared tall; and,
looking him in the face he seemed a giant.
"The clock has struck, the boat is waiting; will you not come?"
At these words, spoken in bad French, but distinctly audible in the
silence, a little noise was heard in the other top room, and the young
man came down as lightly as a bird.
When Godefroid appeared, the lady's face turned crimson; she trembled,
started, and covered her face with her white hands.
Any woman might have shared her agitation at the sight of this youth
of about twenty, of a form and stature so slender that at a first
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: But I presently found an antique which was older than either
the battered Cathedral or the date assigned to the piece
of history; it was a spiral-shaped fossil as large as
the crown of a hat; it was embedded in the marble bench,
and had been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth.
Contrasted with the inconceivable antiquity of this
modest fossil, those other things were flippantly
modern--jejune--mere matters of day-before-yesterday.
The sense of the oldness of the Cathedral vanished away
under the influence of this truly venerable presence.
St. Mark's is monumental; it is an imperishable remembrancer
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: niches, and weave a crown of beautiful bluebell flowers about the
carved stone. At this moment the blue buds were unfolding in the fair
saint's eyes. Mlle. Armande loved the charming couple as if they stood
apart from real life; she saw nothing wrong in a married woman's love
for Victurnien; any other woman she would have judged harshly; but in
this case, not to have loved her nephew would have been the
unpardonable sin. Aunts, mothers, and sisters have a code of their own
for nephews and sons and brothers.
Mlle. Armande was in Venice; she saw the lines of fairy palaces that
stand on either side of the Grand Canal; she was sitting in
Victurnien's gondola; he was telling her what happiness it had been to
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