| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: curiosity, a light of joy shone in Emilie's soul, for she found life
delicious when thus intimately connected with another than herself.
She began to understand the relations of life. Whether it is that
happiness makes us better, or that she was too fully occupied to
torment other people, she became less caustic, more gentle, and
indulgent. This change in her temper enchanted and amazed her family.
Perhaps, at last, her selfishness was being transformed to love. It
was a deep delight to her to look for the arrival of her bashful and
unconfessed adorer. Though they had not uttered a word of passion, she
knew that she was loved, and with what art did she not lead the
stranger to unlock the stores of his information, which proved to be
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: "And at Santa Ysabel how long?"
"Twenty years."
"I should have thought," said Gaston, looking lightly at the desert and
unpeopIed mountains, "that now and again you might have wished to
travel."
"Were I your age," murmured Padre Ignacio, "it might be so."
The evening had now ripened to the long after-glow of sunset. The sea was
the purple of grapes, and wine-colored hues flowed among the high
shoulders of the mountains.
"I have seen a sight like this," said Gaston, "between Granada and
Malaga."
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: stretched along the valley, out of which rose the massy mountains,
their lower cliffs in pale gray shadow, hardly distinguishable from
the floating vapor but gradually ascending till they caught the
sunlight, which ran in sharp touches of ruddy color along the
angular crags, and pierced, in long, level rays, through their
fringes of spearlike pine. Far above shot up red, splintered masses
of castellated rock, jagged and shivered into myriads of fantastic
forms, with here and there a streak of sunlit snow traced down their
chasms like a line of forked lightning; and far beyond and far above
all these, fainter than the morning cloud but purer and changeless,
slept, in the blue sky, the utmost peaks of the eternal snow.
|
