| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter
to any of them really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to
meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a
subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether about
something that concerns only myself." He was talking to Miss
Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed
himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and
this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact
presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in
the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending
his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: the galleys was exemplary. Everybody knows he is as honest as the most
honest man among us. Only he is proud; he doesn't choose to expose
himself to rebuff; so he lives quietly by himself and does good in his
own way. He has made a nursery of about ten acres for you on the other
side of the Roche-Vive; he plants in the forests wherever he thinks
there's a chance of making a tree grow; he trims the tree and cuts out
the dead wood, and ties it up into bundles for the poor. All the poor
people know they can get their wood from him all cut and ready to
burn; so they go and ask him for it, instead of taking it themselves
and injuring your forest. He is another kind of /chauffeur/ now, and
warms his poor neighbors to their comfort and not to their harm. Oh,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: Greek" as a sneer, whereas it occurs in an unmistakably sincere eulogy
of Shakespear, written after his death, and is clearly meant to
heighten the impression of Shakespear's prodigious natural endowments
by pointing out that they were not due to scholastic acquirements.
Now there is a sense in which it is true enough that Shakespear was
too little esteemed by his own generation, or, for the matter of that,
by any subsequent generation. The bargees on the Regent's Canal do
not chant Shakespear's verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said to
chant the verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some
reason during my stay in Venice: at least no gondolier ever did it in
my hearing). Shakespear is no more a popular author than Rodin is a
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