| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so
doing,--there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal
gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony.
It is often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic,
view of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the
vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the
pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.
For example: tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy
of wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure,
was said to be as close-fisted as if his gripe were of iron. The
ancestor had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness,
House of Seven Gables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: she turned round to shut the door in a glass partition through
which Hippolyte might have caught sight of some linen hung by
lines over patent ironing stoves, an old camp-bed, some wood-
embers, charcoal, irons, a filter, the household crockery, and
all the utensils familiar to a small household. Muslin curtains,
fairly white, carefully screened this lumber-room--a capharnaum,
as the French call such a domestic laboratory,--which was lighted
by windows looking out on a neighboring yard.
Hippolyte, with the quick eye of an artist, saw the uses, the
furniture, the general effect and condition of this first room,
thus cut in half. The more honorable half, which served both as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: Raoul, angry and at the same time uneasy, ran after him and
seized him by the arm. "Grimaud!" he cried; "remain; I wish
it."
"Then," replied Grimaud, "you wish me to allow monsieur le
comte to be killed." He saluted and made a movement to
depart.
"Grimaud, my friend," said the viscount, "will you leave me
thus, in such anxiety? Speak, speak, in Heaven's name!" And
Raoul fell back trembling upon his chair.
"I can tell you but one thing, sir, for the secret you wish
to know is not my own. You met a monk, did you not?"
Twenty Years After |
