| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: pervading flame! Ha! The fiend!"
I was somewhat startled by this latter exclamation. The tales
were almost consumed, but just then threw forth a broad sheet of
fire, which flickered as with laughter, making the whole room
dance in its brightness, and then roared portentously up the
chimney.
"You saw him? You must have seen him!" cried Oberon. "How he
glared at me and laughed, in that last sheet of flame, with just
the features that I imagined for him! Well! The tales are gone."
The papers were indeed reduced to a heap of black cinders, with a
multitude of sparks hurrying confusedly among them, the traces of
The Snow Image |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: and was the more circumspect. On the whole his surmises, in addition
to what he knew of the fact, increased his friendliness and tolerance
towards Ladislaw, and made him understand the vacillation which kept
him at Middlemarch after he had said that he should go away.
It was significant of the separateness be tween Lydgate's mind and
Rosamond's that he had no impulse to speak to her on the subject;
indeed, he did not quite trust her reticence towards Will.
And he was right there; though he had no vision of the way
in which her mind would act in urging her to speak.
When she repeated Fred's news to Lydgate, he said, "Take care you
don't drop the faintest hint to Ladislaw, Rosy. He is likely to fly
Middlemarch |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little
morals tagged to them, but these lacked relationship to the lives
of little slum-boys. Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord
and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as
practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive
away a pestilence.
I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the
papers, and watching politics and business. I, followed the fates
of my little slum-boys--and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was
getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the
panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty
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