| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: thought to himself that he would always have leisure to admire the
canon, or to cut his nails, and he trotted off quickly through the
town, as a little woman trots towards her pleasure.
His two cousins having no presumption of the divinatory science, of
which shepherds have had many passing attacks, had often talked before
him of their secret goings on, counting him as nothing.
Now one evening, to amuse the canon, Pille-grue had recounted to him
how had fallen in love with him a wife of a jeweller on whose head he
had adjusted certain carved, burnished, sculptured, historical horns,
fit for the brow of a prince. The good lady was to hear him, a right
merry wench, quick at opportunities, giving an embrace while her
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have
lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a
century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice
Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted
mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the
differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the
bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted
his vision wherever he looked.
The great fact all the while, however, had been the
incalculability; since he HAD supposed himself, from decade to
decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: all London to the last degree, I think most needlessly. The city
and town is at this moment stiller than I have ever known it, for
not a carriage dares to be out. Nothing is to be seen but a
"special constable" (every gentleman in London is sworn into that
office), occasionally some on foot, some on horseback, scouring the
streets. I took a drive early this morning with Mr. Bancroft, and
nothing could be less like the eve of a revolution. This evening,
when the petition is to be presented, may bring some disturbance,
not from the Chartists themselves, but from the disorderly persons
who may avail themselves of the occasion. The Queen left town on
Saturday for the Isle of Wight, as she had so lately been confined
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