| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: itself back from the wall; and, as the wall was luckily strong
enough not to be blown down, the lava kept blowing itself back
till it had time to cool. And so, my dear child, there was no
miracle at all in the matter; and the poor people of Catania had
to thank not St. Agatha, and any interference of hers, but simply
Him who can preserve, just as He can destroy, by those laws of
nature which are the breath of His mouth and the servants of His
will.
But in many a case the lava does not stop. It rolls on and on
over the downs and through the valleys, till it reaches the sea-
shore, as it did in Hawaii in the Sandwich Islands this very year.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: and poet, heart and heart. She had a trick of using high-sounding
phrases, interlarded with exaggerated expressions, the kind of stuff
ingeniously nicknamed tartines by the French journalist, who furnishes
a daily supply of the commodity for a public that daily performs the
difficult feat of swallowing it. She squandered superlatives
recklessly in her talk, and the smallest things took giant
proportions. It was at this period of her career that she began to
type-ize, individualize, synthesize, dramatize, superiorize, analyze,
poetize, angelize, neologize, tragedify, prosify, and colossify--you
must violate the laws of language to find words to express the new-
fangled whimsies in which even women here and there indulge. The heat
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: her habit with his pocket-handkerchief. 'Come, please; we will go
on together.' Her distress seemed to make things simple again. It
was as if the cloud that hung over them had melted as she wept, and
lifted, and drifted a little further on. For the moment, naturally,
nothing mattered except that she should be comforted. As she walked
by his side shaken with her effort at self-control, he had to resist
the impulse to touch her. His hand tingled to do its part in
soothing her, his arm ached to protect her, while he vaguely felt an
element of right, of justice, in her tears; they were in a manner
his own. What he did was to turn and ask the syce following if he
had loosened the Turk's saddle-girths.
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