| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: all incompatible with the elbow-chair feeling, which desires some
employment that may divert the mind without fatiguing the body.
Under the influence of these impressions, I have sometimes
thought of this literary undertaking. I must have been the
Bonassus himself to have mistaken myself for a genius; yet I have
leisure and reflections like my neighbours. I am a borderer,
also, between two generations, and can point out more, perhaps,
than others of those fading traces of antiquity which are daily
vanishing; and I know many a modern instance and many an old
tradition, and therefore I ask--
"What ails me, I may not as well as they
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso: To rear a huge alarm with hideous cries,
Therewith the hardy couple forward run
To execute their valiant enterprise:
So from a cannon or a roaring gun
At once the noise, the flame, and bullet flies,
They run, they give the charge, begin the fray,
And all at once their foes break, spoil and slay.
XLV
They passed first through thousand thousand blows,
And then performed their designment bold,
A fiery ball each on the engine throws,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: de Rhetore, on account of certain ill-sounding words said about a
friend. Those words, in the first place, he could not help hearing;
and having heard them it was, I will not say his duty, but his /right/
to resent them."
"Ah!" said Madame de Rastignac, "then it was he who fought that duel
people said so much about?"
"Yes, madame, and I ought to say--for I understand such matters--that
at the meeting he behaved with consummate bravery."
To avoid the recital of the second fine action, Madame de l'Estorade,
at the risk of impolitely cutting short a topic thus begun, rose, and
made an almost imperceptible sign to her husband that she wished to
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