| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: shame.'"
So much, with tears and gasps of horror, Mrs. Welland
imparted, blanched and demolished by the unwonted
obligation of having at last to fix her eyes on
the unpleasant and the discreditable. "If only I could
keep it from your father-in-law: he always says:
`Augusta, for pity's sake, don't destroy my last illusions'
--and how am I to prevent his knowing these horrors?"
the poor lady wailed.
"After all, Mamma, he won't have SEEN them," her
daughter suggested; and Mrs. Welland sighed: "Ah,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: RECONSTRUCTION
The assembling of the Second Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress
may very properly be made the occasion of a few earnest words
on the already much-worn topic of reconstruction.
Seldom has any legislative body been the subject of a solicitude
more intense, or of aspirations more sincere and ardent.
There are the best of reasons for this profound interest.
Questions of vast moment, left undecided by the last session of Congress,
must be manfully grappled with by this. No political skirmishing will avail.
The occasion demands statesmanship.
Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: black mud, a vale of sorrows which are real and joys too often
hollow; but this audience is so accustomed to terrible
sensations, that only some unimaginable and well-neigh impossible
woe could produce any lasting impression there. Now and again
there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of the
complication of virtues and vices that bring them about, that
egotism and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to
pity; but the impression that they receive is like a luscious
fruit, soon consumed. Civilization, like the car of Juggernaut,
is scarcely stayed perceptibly in its progress by a heart less
easy to break than the others that lie in its course; this also
Father Goriot |
