| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: scarcely given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his
home at La Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters,
which he conjured me to return to her--when he grew speechless in
the middle of a sentence; but from his last gesture, I understood
that the fatal key would be my passport in his mother's house. It
troubled him that he was powerless to utter a single word to
thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no doubt. He looked
wistfully at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped in token
of farewell, and his head sank, and he died. His death was the
only fatal accident caused by the overturn.
"But it was partly his own fault," the coachman said to me.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because
of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose
that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued
through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due
to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any
departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope--fervently
do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Second Inaugural Address |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: at Blix. There was just light enough to see. She was leaning
back in her chair, her hands fallen into her lap, her head back
and a little to one side. As usual, she was in black; but now it
was some sort of dinner-gown that left her arms and neck bare.
The line of the chin and the throat and the sweet round curve of
the shoulder had in it something indescribable--something that was
related to music, and that eluded speech. Her hair was nothing
more than a warm colored mist without form or outline. The sloe-
brown of her little eyes and the flush of her cheek were mere
inferences--like the faintest stars that are never visible when
looked at directly; and it seemed to him that there was disengaged
|
