| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: "Because he has reasons of his own for not concealing it," said the
cure, in a low tone.
Blondet then beheld a personage of whom he had heard much ever since
his arrival, and whom he desired to know, the land-steward of Les
Aigues. He saw a man of medium height, about thirty years of age, with
a sulky look and a discontented face, on which a smile sat ill.
Beneath an anxious brow a pair of greenish eyes evaded the eyes of
others, and so disguised their thought. Sibilet was dressed in a brown
surtout coat, black trousers and waistcoat, and wore his hair long and
flat to the head, which gave him a clerical look. His trousers barely
concealed that he was knock-kneed. Though his pallid complexion and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: epigram--a volume in a word--no longer strikes, as it did in the
eighteenth century, at persons or at things, but at squalid events,
and it dies in a day."
"Hence," said Blondet, "the intelligence of the lady, if she has any,
consists in casting doubts on everything. Here lies the great
difference between two women; the townswoman is certainly virtuous;
the lady does not know yet whether she is, or whether she always will
be; she hesitates and struggles where the other refuses point-blank
and falls full length. This hesitancy in everything is one of the last
graces left to her by our horrible times. She rarely goes to church,
but she will talk to you of religion; and if you have the good taste
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: the white heat of a prophet's zeal, those whom he knew to be unawakened.
There is indeed a good deal of the prophet about John Ruskin. Though
essentially an interpreter with a singularly fine appreciation of beauty,
no man of the nineteenth century felt more keenly that he had a mission,
and none was more loyal to what he believed that mission to be.
While still in college, what seemed a chance incident gave
occasion and direction to this mission. A certain English reviewer
had ridiculed the work of the artist Turner. Now Ruskin held
Turner to be the greatest landscape painter the world had seen,
and he immediately wrote a notable article in his defense. Slowly
this article grew into a pamphlet, and the pamphlet into a book,
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