| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: ever knew blazes afresh, and repeats the heavenly words we once heard
and understood. The voice rolls on; it embraces in its rapid turns
those fugitive horizons, and they shrink away; they vanish, eclipsed
by newer and deeper joys--those of an unrevealed future, to which the
fairy points as she returns to the blue heaven."
"And you," retorted Cataneo, "have you never seen the direct ray of a
star opening the vistas above; have you never mounted on that beam
which guides you to the sky, to the heart of the first causes which
move the worlds?"
To their hearers, the Duke and Capraja were playing a game of which
the premises were unknown.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: Helena's door: he glared fiercely at the nurse as she entered with
the birth-posset for the young mother. No one else was allowed to
pass, that night, nor the next. Four days afterwards, Sasha,
having a message to the Princess, and supposing the old man to be
asleep, attempted to step noiselessly over his body. In a twinkle
the Prince's teeth fastened themselves in the serf's leg, and held
him with the tenacity of a bull-dog. Sasha did not dare to cry
out: he stood, writhing with pain, until the strong jaws grew weary
of their hold, and then crawled away to dress the bleeding wound.
After that, no one tried to break the Prince's guard.
The christening was on a magnificent scale. Prince Paul of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: uninteresting than a happy man, so let us say no more on that head,
and return to the rest of the characters.
"About a year after the purchase of the practice, I was dragged into a
bachelor breakfast-party given by one of our number who had lost a bet
to a young man greatly in vogue in the fashionable world. M. de
Trailles, the flower of the dandyism of that day, enjoyed a prodigious
reputation."
"But he is still enjoying it," put in the Comte de Born. "No one wears
his clothes with a finer air, nor drives a tandem with a better grace.
It is Maxime's gift; he can gamble, eat, and drink more gracefully
than any man in the world. He is a judge of horses, hats, and
Gobseck |
