| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human activity
that came to disturb me as I walked. The lanes were profoundly
still. They would have been sad but for the sunshine and the singing
of the larks. And as it was, there came over me at times a feeling
of isolation that was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make me
quicken my steps eagerly when I saw some one before me on the road.
This fellow-voyager proved to be no less a person than the parish
constable. It had occurred to me that in a district which was so
little populous and so well wooded, a criminal of any intelligence
might play hide-and-seek with the authorities for months; and this
idea was strengthened by the aspect of the portly constable as he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: Unscalable, turreted mountains rose on the inner hand.
And cape, and village, and river, and vale, and mountain above,
Each had a name in the land for men to remember and love;
And never the name of a place, but lo! a song in its praise:
Ancient and unforgotten, songs of the earlier days,
That the elders taught to the young, and at night, in the full of the moon,
Garlanded boys and maidens sang together in tune.
Tamatea the placable went with a lingering foot;
He sang as loud as a bird, he whistled hoarse as a flute;
He broiled in the sun, he breathed in the grateful shadow of trees,
In the icy stream of the rivers he waded over the knees;
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from McTeague by Frank Norris: which Old Grannis was directing himself. There was but one
other chair vacant, and that at the side of Miss Baker. Old
Grannis hesitated, putting his hand to his chin. However,
there was no escape. In great trepidation he sat down
beside the retired dressmaker. Neither of them spoke. Old
Grannis dared not move, but sat rigid, his eyes riveted on
his empty soup plate.
All at once there was a report like a pistol. The men
started in their places. Mrs. Sieppe uttered a muffled
shriek. The waiter from the cheap restaurant, hired as
Maria's assistant, rose from a bending posture, a champagne
McTeague |
