| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: time to think."
Mr. Hoopdriver was puzzled, but admiring. It was wonderful how
clear and ready her words were. But then one might speak well
with a throat and lips like that. He knew he was inadequate, but
he tried to meet the occasion. "If you let them rush you into
anything you might repent of, of course you'd be very silly."
"Don't YOU want to learn?" she asked.
"I was wondering only this morning," he began, and stopped.
She was too intent upon her own thoughts to notice this
insufficiency. "I find myself in life, and it terrifies me. I
seem to be like a little speck, whirling on a wheel, suddenly
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: desire truth, but the one because of its utility, the other for its
beauty. The historian regards it as the rational principle of all
true history, and no more. To the other it comes as an all-
pervading and mystic enthusiasm, 'like the desire of strong wine,
the craving of ambition, the passionate love of what is beautiful.'
Still, though we miss in the historian those higher and more
spiritual qualities which the philosopher of the Academe alone of
all men possessed, we must not blind ourselves to the merits of
that great rationalist who seems to have anticipated the very
latest words of modern science. Nor yet is he to be regarded
merely in the narrow light in which he is estimated by most modern
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming
grove, among the fields and vineyards. The towns were
compact, in about equal proportions, of bright, new wooden
houses and great and growing forest trees; and the chapel
bell on the engine sounded most festally that sunny Sunday,
as we drew up at one green town after another, with the
townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best to see the
strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and
great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by
our mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and
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