| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Betty Zane by Zane Grey: in the long grass like a snake, to shoot from coverts, to worm his way
stealthily through the dense woods and to ambush the paleface's trail.
Horrible cruelties, such as torturing white prisoners and burning them at the
stake never heard of before the war made upon the Indians by the whites.
Comparatively little is known of the real character of the Indian of that
time. We ourselves sit before our warm fires and talk of the deeds of the
redman. We while away an hour by reading Pontiac's siege of Detroit, of the
battle of Braddock's fields, and of Custer's last charge. We lay the book down
with a fervent expression of thankfulness that the day of the horrible redman
is past. Because little has been written on the subject, no thought is given
to the long years of deceit and treachery practiced upon Pontiac; we are
Betty Zane |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a
rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then
kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of
the sea-beholding city in the plain. From many points in the moss
you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its
tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its
corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be breathed;
Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on
a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem
to the in-expert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a
bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: would go far for such a husband. But do I desire
unreasonably much in wanting what is called life--
music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating
and pulsing that are going on in the great arteries
of the world? That was the shape of my youthful dream;
but I did not get it. Yet I thought I saw the way to it in my Clym."
"And you only married him on that account?"
"There you mistake me. I married him because I loved him,
but I won't say that I didn't love him partly because I
thought I saw a promise of that life in him."
"You have dropped into your old mournful key."
Return of the Native |
