| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: passed into the next chamber to consult. They stayed there
closeted about an hour; at the end of which period they had come
to a good understanding, and my uncle and I set our hands to the
agreement in a formal manner. By the terms of this, my uncle
bound himself to satisfy Rankeillor as to his intromissions, and
to pay me two clear thirds of the yearly income of Shaws.
So the beggar in the ballad had come home; and when I lay down
that night on the kitchen chests, I was a man of means and had a
name in the country. Alan and Torrance and Rankeillor slept and
snored on their hard beds; but for me who had lain out under
heaven and upon dirt and stones, so many days and nights, and
Kidnapped |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: So that the gentle creature shut from all
Her charitable use, and face to face
With twenty months of silence, slowly lost
Nor greatly cared to lose, her hold on life.
Last, some low fever ranging round to spy
The weakness of a people or a house,
Like flies that haunt a wound, or deer, or men,
Or almost all that is, hurting the hurt--
Save Christ as we believe him--found the girl
And flung her down upon a couch of fire,
Where careless of the household faces near,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: the book ungodly, immoral, base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of
course it is; for so is the world of which it is a picture." No;
the most notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity; its
dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance of the human heart,
want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the actors in it are
not men and women, but ferrets--with here and there, of course, a
stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed. It is the inhuman
mirror of an inhuman age, in which the healthy human heart can find
no more interest than in a pathological museum.
That last, indeed, "Gil Blas" is; a collection of diseased
specimens. No man or woman in the book, lay or clerical, gentle or
|
