| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: career he was fit for. Moreau was really thinking of some day
proposing Oscar to the count as his successor.
But to give to the devil and to God what respectively belongs to them,
perhaps it would be well to show the causes of Oscar Husson's silly
self-conceit, premising that he was born in the household of Madame
Mere. During his early childhood his eyes were dazzled by imperial
splendors. His pliant imagination retained the impression of those
gorgeous scenes, and nursed the images of a golden time of pleasure in
hopes of recovering them. The natural boastfulness of school-boys
(possessed of a desire to outshine their mates) resting on these
memories of his childhood was developed in him beyond all measure. It
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: good friend beside you, and without boasting, a woman as will nurse
you like a mother nurses her first child. I nursed Cibot round once
when Dr. Poulain had given him over; he had the shroud up to his eyes,
as the saying is, and they gave him up for dead. Well, well, you have
not come to that yet, God be thanked, ill though you may be. Count on
me; I would pull you through all by myself, I would! Keep still, don't
you fidget like that."
She pulled the coverlet over the patient's hands as she spoke.
"There, sonny! M. Schmucke and I will sit up with you of nights. A
prince won't be no better nursed . . . and besides, you needn't refuse
yourself nothing that's necessary, you can afford it.--I have just
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: perfection. After that, under the pressure of a train of rather severe
lessons, which Gibbon has detailed in his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire," little or nothing was heard of it, save sotto voce, perhaps, at
the Papal courts of the sixteenth century. To revive it publicly, or at
least as much of it as could be borne by a world now for seventeen
centuries Christian, was the glory of the eighteenth century. The moral
scheme of Theodorus has now nearly vanished among us, at least as a
confessed creed; and, in spite of the authority of Mr. Locke's great and
good name, his metaphysical scheme is showing signs of a like
approaching disappearance. Let us hope that it may be a speedy one; for
if the senses be the only avenues to knowledge; if man be the measure of
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