| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: garden beds. Interchange of glances, delicate and sweet as blue water-
flowers on the surface of the stream; a look in either face, vanishing
as swiftly as the scent of briar-rose; melancholy, tender as the
velvet of moss--these were the blossoms of two rare natures, springing
up out of a rich and fruitful soil on foundations of rock. Many a time
Eve had seen revelations of the strength that lay below the appearance
of weakness, and made such full allowance for all that David left
undone, that the slightest word now might bring about a closer union
of soul and soul.
Eve opened the door, and Lucien sat down without a word at the little
table on an X-shaped trestle. There was no tablecloth; the poor little
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: were some learned foreigners, too--soldiers and rich citizens. The
broad faces were there, with prominent brows and venerable beards,
which fill us with a sort of pious respect for our ancestors when we
see their portraits from the Middle Ages. Lean faces, too, with
burning, sunken eyes, under bald heads yellow from the labors of
futile scholasticism, contrasted with young and eager countenances,
grave faces, warlike faces, and the ruddy cheeks of the financial
class.
These lectures, dissertations, theses, sustained by the brightest
geniuses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, roused our
forefathers to enthusiasm. They were to them their bull-fights, their
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: {185} Penelope having been now sufficiently whitewashed,
disappears from the poem.
{186} So practised a washerwoman as our authoress doubtless knew
that by this time the web must have become such a wreck that it
would have gone to pieces in the wash.
A lady points out to me, just as these sheets are leaving my
hands, that no really good needlewoman--no one, indeed, whose
work or character was worth consideration--could have endured,
no matter for what reason, the unpicking of her day's work, day
after day for between three and four years.
{187} We must suppose Dolius not yet to know that his son
The Odyssey |
