| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: my dwelling; you will find nothing but three pound five of my own
savings, which William Dane knows I have had these six months." At
this William groaned, but the minister said, "The proof is heavy
against you, brother Marner. The money was taken in the night last
past, and no man was with our departed brother but you, for William
Dane declares to us that he was hindered by sudden sickness from
going to take his place as usual, and you yourself said that he had
not come; and, moreover, you neglected the dead body."
"I must have slept," said Silas. Then, after a pause, he added,
"Or I must have had another visitation like that which you have all
seen me under, so that the thief must have come and gone while I was
Silas Marner |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: twilight,' and hearing 'the distant clank of the sheep-bell.' One
phrase of his, 'the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of earth,
like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel,' is
curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage is
rather pretty in its way:-
The short tender grass was covered with marguerites - 'such that
men called DAISIES in our town' - thick as stars on a summer's
night. The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed
from a high dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at
intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from
the newly-sown seeds. The blue depths were the colour of the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they
were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced,
and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans
before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a
view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of
his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,
it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary
creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it
seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and
thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and,
Moby Dick |
