| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: My uncle is not the only one; Malaga receives a great many gentlemen.
I did think you such a noble soul. For shame! Will she be such a loss
that you can't replace her?"
"Madame, if I knew any sacrifice I could make to recover your esteem I
would make it; but to give up Malaga is not one--"
"In your position, that is what I should say myself, if I were a man,"
replied Clementine. "Well, if I accept it as a great sacrifice there
can be no ill-will between us."
Paz left the room, fearing he might commit some great folly, and
feeling that wild ideas were getting the better of him. He went to
walk in the open air, lightly dressed in spite of the cold, but
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: you be put to the question, ordinary and extraordinary."
"Is he in good health, and can he bear it?" said the clerk to the
doctor.
"Yes," replied the latter, who was one of the physicians of the house
of Lorraine.
"In that case, retire to the next room; we will send for you whenever
we require your advice."
The physician left the hall.
His first terror having passed, Christophe rallied his courage; the
hour of his martyrdom had come. Thenceforth he looked with cold
curiosity at the arrangements that were made by the executioner and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? The
crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated,
the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond-holes in the
woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only
unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between
wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others
half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was,
though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans
cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I
cultivated, and my hoe played the Rans des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown
Walden |
