| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up
the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of
Wenona's Cliff--still thinking more of the future than of the
past or present--I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a
different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be
laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the
river; and I felt that THIS WAS THE HEROIC AGE ITSELF, though we
know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest
of men.
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and
what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the
Walking |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: succeed they must, when you think of the end in view, and that your
wife will not walk in the mud. It is a shame that I should have to ask
for it. You ought to have guessed my continual discomfort during the
five years since I married you.'
" 'I am quite willing,' returned du Bruel. 'But we shall ruin
ourselves.'
" 'If you run into debt,' she said, 'my uncle's money will clear it
off some day.'
" 'You are quite capable of leaving me the debts and taking the
property.'
" 'Oh! is that the way you take it?' retorted she. 'I have nothing
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: enacted could be seen and noted.
The winter of 1799-1800 was one of the most severe ever known to
Europeans. The Norwegian sea was frozen in all the fiords, where, as a
usual thing, the violence of the surf kept the ice from forming. A
wind, whose effects were like those of the Spanish levanter, swept the
ice of the Strom-fiord, driving the snow to the upper end of the gulf.
Seldom indeed could the people of Jarvis see the mirror of frozen
waters reflecting the colors of the sky; a wondrous site in the bosom
of these mountains when all other aspects of nature are levelled
beneath successive sheets of snow, and crests and valleys are alike
mere folds of the vast mantle flung by winter across a landscape at
Seraphita |
