| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: Latin, where they are so common and make so brave an
architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is a group of
Nature's making. If but some Roman would return from Hades
(Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the
voice these thundering verses should be uttered - 'AUT
LACEDOE-MONIUM TARENTUM,' for a case in point - I feel as if
I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the best of
human verses.
But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be;
by the mere count of syllables the four groups cannot be all
iambic; as a question of elegance, I doubt if any one of them
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: our being there. He asked the woman her name--her predecessor's
name-- his predecessor's name. 'That won't do,' he said, with
good-humoured impatience; 'who was his predecessor?' 'Mr. Riebau,'
she replied, and immediately added, as if suddenly recollecting
herself, 'He, sir, was the master of Sir Charles Faraday.'
'Nonsense!' he responded, 'there is no such person.' Great was her
delight when I told her the name of her visitor; but she assured me
that as soon as she saw him running about the shop, she felt-though
she did not know why--that it must be 'Sir Charles Faraday.'
Faraday did, as you know, accompany Davy to Rome: he was re-engaged
by the managers of the Royal Institution on May 15, 1815. Here he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: boulevard des Italiens, where they found themselves surrounded by the
elegances then in fashion. A young man about twenty-eight years of age
advanced to meet them with a smiling face, for he saw Leon de Lora
first. Vauvinet held out his hand with apparent friendliness to
Bixiou, and bowed coldly to Gazonal as he motioned them to enter his
office, where bourgeois taste was visible beneath the artistic
appearance of the furniture, and in spite of the statuettes and the
thousand other little trifles applied to our little apartments by
modern art, which has made itself as small as its patrons.
Vauvinet was dressed, like other young men of our day who go into
business, with extreme elegance, which many of them regard as a
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