| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: sound,--and pointing upward, with a look never to be forgotten,
she fell back in the seat, and covered her face. The door was
shut, and the carriage drove on.
What a situation, now, for a patriotic senator, that had been
all the week before spurring up the legislature of his native
state to pass more stringent resolutions against escaping fugitives,
their harborers and abettors!
Our good senator in his native state had not been exceeded
by any of his brethren at Washington, in the sort of eloquence
which has won for them immortal renown! How sublimely he had sat
with his hands in his pockets, and scouted all sentimental weakness
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: he felt the load too heavy to be taken up again.
A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase
of sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won
it, and came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were
thriving enough to engross him in the pauses of his professional
work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself
in the face. Not unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the
subtleties of introspection--he mistook his temporary
insensibility for a gradual revival of moral health.
He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion,
getting to see things in their true light; and if he now thought
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: while I was in a few moments seated at the toilet to undergo my
hair-dressing, surrounded by all my apparatus, and a blazing fire to
welcome me with a hissing tea-kettle of hot water and every comfort.
How well the English understand it, I learn more and more every day.
My maid had a large room above me, also with a fire; indeed, a
"lady's" maid is a VERY GREAT character INDEED, and would be much
more unwilling to take her tea with, or speak familiarly to, a
footman or a housemaid than I should. My greatest mistakes in
England have been committed toward those high dignitaries, my own
maid and the butler, whose grandeur I entirely misappreciated and
invaded, as in my ignorance I placed them, as we do, on the same
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