| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: "I don't know--that he liked her immensely."
"And she--didn't she like him?"
"She said he was a god." Miss Tita gave me this information flatly,
without expression; her tone might have made it a piece of trivial gossip.
But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the summer night;
it seemed such a direct testimony.
"Fancy, fancy!" I murmured. And then, "Tell me this, please--has she
got a portrait of him? They are distressingly rare."
"A portrait? I don't know," said Miss Tita; and now there
was discomfiture in her face. "Well, good night!" she added;
and she turned into the house.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his return to India he founded
the Nizam College at Hyderabad, and has since laboured
incessantly, and at great personal sacrifice, in the cause of
education.
Sarojini was the eldest of a large family, all of whom were
taught English at an early age. "I," she writes, "was stubborn
and refused to speak it. So one day when I was nine years old my
father punished me--the only time I was ever punished--by
shutting me in a room alone for a whole day. I came out of it a
full-blown linguist. I have never spoken any other language to
him, or to my mother, who always speaks to me in Hindustani. I
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: which the end of life is represented with so nice a tact. I was
asked the other day if Dumas made me laugh or cry. Well in this my
late fifth reading of the VICOMTE, I did laugh once at the small
Coquelin de Voliere business, and was perhaps a thought surprised
at having done so: to make up for it, I smiled continually. But
for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, I must
own the tale trips upon a very airy foot - within a measurable
distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be
discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may
even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to me; I cannot
count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with those I
|
