| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: whom I might never see again. It chanced, however, that she was
awake, and had overheard those words which I spoke with the dead,
while I was yet asleep and after; and though some of this talk was
in the tongue of the Otomie, the most was English, and knowing the
names of my children she guessed the purport of it all. Suddenly
she sprang from the bed and stood over me, and there was such anger
in her eyes as I had never seen before nor have seen since, nor did
it last long then, for presently indeed it was quenched in tears.
'What is it, wife?' I asked astonished.
'It is hard,' she answered, 'that I must bear to listen to such
talk from your lips, husband. Was it not enough that, when all men
Montezuma's Daughter |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Duchess of Padua by Oscar Wilde: Get horses ready, we will fly to-night.
The past is a bad dream, we will forget it:
Before us lies the future: shall we not have
Sweet days of love beneath our vines and laugh? -
No, no, we will not laugh, but, when we weep,
Well, we will weep together; I will serve you;
I will be very meek and very gentle:
You do not know me.
GUIDO
Nay, I know you now;
Get hence, I say, out of my sight.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and
duller, are still comely animals. To judge by the eye, there is no
race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands. When
Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the
inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the
same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual
natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman
Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but
two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both
Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the
christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must
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