| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom
pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was
unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic,
sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest
natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the
scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape
features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant
eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white
trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I
can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the
after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: mysterious sights they had seen--only to be accounted for by
supernatural agency; of white witches and black witches; and the
standard story of the spirits of the two brothers who had fought
and fallen, and had haunted Hintock House till they were exorcised
by the priest, and compelled to retreat to a swamp in this very
wood, whence they were returning to their old quarters at the rate
of a cock's stride every New-year's Day, old style; hence the
local saying, "On New-year's tide, a cock's stride."
It was a pleasant time. The smoke from the little fire of peeled
sticks rose between the sitters and the sunlight, and behind its
blue veil stretched the naked arms of the prostrate trees The
The Woodlanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: influence of Cornelius could powerfully support the negotiations now
begun by Desquerdes, the general to whom Louis XI. had given the
command of the army encamped on the frontiers of Belgium. These two
master-foxes were, therefore, like two duellists, whose arms are
paralyzed by chance.
So, whether it were that from that day the king's health failed and
went from bad to worse, or that Cornelius did assist in bringing into
France Marguerite of Burgundy--who arrived at Ambroise in July, 1438,
to marry the Dauphin to whom she was betrothed in the chapel of the
castle--certain it is that the king took no steps in the matter of the
hidden treasure; he levied no tribute from his silversmith, and the
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