| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: forth from its recesses of night the sounds of screams
and curses. Above were sculptured rows of lowering,
ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's cartoons,
and out of these sprang into the vague upper gloom--on the
one side, lamp-posts from which negroes hung by the neck,
and on the other gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires,
and between the two glowed a spectral picture of some
black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic masks,
making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.
Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized
it for a very tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: her way in her native place, where she is known, where she is always
in her place, and every one makes way for her. Thus she loses all the
charm of the unforeseen.
And have you ever noticed the effect on human beings of a life in
common? By the ineffaceable instinct of simian mimicry they all tend
to copy each other. Each one, without knowing it, acquires the
gestures, the tone of voice, the manner, the attitudes, the very
countenance of others. In six years Dinah had sunk to the pitch of the
society she lived in. As she acquired Monsieur de Clagny's ideas she
assumed his tone of voice; she unconsciously fell into masculine
manners from seeing none but men; she fancied that by laughing at what
The Muse of the Department |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: Spain shall have three kings; which is now wonderfully verified;
for besides the King of Portugal, which properly is part of
Spain, there are now two rivals for Spain, Charles and Philip:
But Charles being descended fro the Count of Hapsburgh, founder
of the Austrian family, shall soon make those heads but two; by
overturning Philip, and driving him out of Spain.
Some of these predictions are already fulfilled; and it is highly
probable the rest may be in due time; and, I think, I have not
forced the words, by my explication, into any other sense than
what they will naturally bear. If this be granted, I am sure it
must be also allow'd, that the author (whoever he were) was a
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