| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle: reaching high aloft, and in the center of the north side was a raised
dais for the King and Queen, shaded by canvas of gay colors,
and hung about with streaming silken pennants of red and blue
and green and white. As yet the King and Queen had not come,
but all the other benches were full of people, rising head above
head high aloft till it made the eye dizzy to look upon them.
Eightscore yards distant from the mark from which the archers
were to shoot stood ten fair targets, each target marked by a flag
of the color belonging to the band that was to shoot thereat.
So all was ready for the coming of the King and Queen.
At last a great blast of bugles sounded, and into the meadow came
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: judgments and elaborate indifferences which translate themselves so
plainly in a young lady receiving addresses. She turned herself out
very freshly and very well; she was always ready for everything, and
I am sure that no glance of Dacres Tottenham's found aught but
direct and decorous response. His society on these occasions gave
her solid pleasure; so did the drive and the lunch; the
satisfactions were apparently upon the same plane. She was aware of
the plum, if I may be permitted a brusque but irresistible simile;
and with her mouth open, her eyes modestly closed, and her head in a
convenient position, she waited, placidly, until it should fall in.
The Farnham ladies would have been delighted with the result of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: the story of some poor devil of a valet who gave up his life for a
single glance from a queen of Spain.
"What could he do but die?" I exclaimed.
This delighted him, and he looked at me in a way which was truly
alarming.
In the evening I went to a ball at the Duchesse de Lenoncourt's. The
Prince de Talleyrand happened to be there; and I got M. de Vandenesse,
a charming young man, to ask him whether, among the guests at his
country-place in 1809, he remembered any one of the name of Henarez.
Vandenesse reported the Prince's reply, word for word, as follows:
"Henarez is the Moorish name of the Soria family, who are, they say,
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