| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: I thought, that such a thing as the vivisection of men was carried
on here? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky;
and suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid
realisation of my own danger.
XI. THE HUNTING OF THE MAN.
IT came before my mind with an unreasonable hope of escape that
the outer door of my room was still open to me. I was convinced now,
absolutely assured, that Moreau had been vivisecting a human being.
All the time since I had heard his name, I had been trying to link
in my mind in some way the grotesque animalism of the islanders
with his abominations; and now I thought I saw it all.
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: which is the life of verse would instantly be lost. We have
here a clue to the effect of polysyllables, above all in
Latin, where they are so common and make so brave an
architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is a group of
Nature's making. If but some Roman would return from Hades
(Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the
voice these thundering verses should be uttered - 'AUT
LACEDOE-MONIUM TARENTUM,' for a case in point - I feel as if
I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the best of
human verses.
But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: torrent that rushed over a wild chaos of rocks beneath him. Now and again he
caught glimpses, framed in green foliage, of the golden brown of Lute's
corduroy riding-habit and of the bay horse that moved beneath her.
She rode out into an open space where a loose earth-slide denied lodgement to
trees and grass. She halted the horse at the brink of the slide and glanced
down it with a measuring eye. Forty feet beneath, the slide terminated in a
small, firm-surfaced terrace, the banked accumulation of fallen earth and
gravel.
"It's a good test," she called across the canyon. "I'm going to put him down
it."
The animal gingerly launched himself on the treacherous footing, irregularly
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