| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: coral was soft under the sea, and hardened by exposure to air; than
Marsigli's notion, that the coral-polypes were its flowers; than
Dr. Parsons' contemptuous denial, that these complicated forms
could be "the operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like
animals, and not the work of more sure vegetation;" than Baker the
microscopist's detailed theory of their being produced by the
crystallization of the mineral salts in the sea-water, just as he
had seen "the particles of mercury and copper in aquafortis assume
tree-like forms, or curious delineations of mosses and minute
shrubs on slates and stones, owing to the shooting of salts
intermixed with mineral particles:" - one smiles at it now: yet
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: random the Athenaeum, the Revivalist, and the Penny Pictorial
Weekly. So there was John set up with literature, and Morris had
laid balm upon his conscience.
As if to reward him, he was received in his place of business
with good news. Orders were pouring in; there was a run on some
of the back stock, and the figure had gone up. Even the manager
appeared elated. As for Morris, who had almost forgotten the
meaning of good news, he longed to sob like a little child; he
could have caught the manager (a pallid man with startled
eyebrows) to his bosom; he could have found it in his generosity
to give a cheque (for a small sum) to every clerk in the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: the courteous manners of the olden time; he could make graceful
speeches and understand the whole Charter, or most of it. Though he
loved the Bourbons with noble frankness, believed in God as a
gentleman should, and read nothing but the "Quotidienne," he was not
as ridiculous as the liberals of his department would fain have had
him. He could hold his own in the court circle, provided no one talked
to him of "Moses in Egypt," nor of the drama, or romanticism, or local
color, nor of railways. He himself had never got beyond Monsieur de
Voltaire, Monsieur le Comte de Buffon, Payronnet, and the Chevalier
Gluck, the Queen's favorite musician.
"Madame," he said to the Marquise de Listomere, who was on his arm as
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