| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: warm enough to do the perpetual honours of a baronial castle; so
you may know how the little room and the faces about the homely
table glowed and brightened. Even Knowles began to think that
Holmes might not be so bad, after all, recalling the chicken in
the mill, and,--"Well, it was better to think well of all men,
poor devils!"
I am sorry to say there was a short thunderstorm in the very
midst of the dinner. Knowles and Mr. Howth, in their anxiety to
keep off from ancient subjects of dispute, came, for a wonder, on
modern politics, and of course there was a terrible collision,
which made Mrs. Howth quite breathless: it was over in a minute,
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: to stretch itself wider and wider about the earth, larger and
increasingly larger areas of the world have, as time went on,
received simultaneously the shock of a great calamity; but this
is the first time in history that the entire surface of the globe
has been swept in a single instant with the thrill of so gigantic
an event.
And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world
this spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He
is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates
of degree and value go: a soiled and patched young loafer,
without gifts, without talents, without education, without
What is Man? |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: Justice was on high, or rather, monsieur, it was here," and the
Marquis struck his hand on his heart. "I did not choose that my
children should be able to think of me as I have thought of my father
and of my ancestors. I aim at leaving them an unblemished inheritance
and escutcheon. I did not choose that nobility should be a lie in my
person. And, after all, politically speaking, ought those emigres who
are now appealing against revolutionary confiscations, to keep the
property derived from antecedent confiscations by positive crimes?
"I found in M. Jeanrenaud and his mother the most perverse honesty; to
hear them you would suppose that they were robbing me. In spite of all
I could say, they will accept no more than the value of the lands at
|
