| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: won't" of Bathsheba meant virtually, "I think I must."
She followed her assistants through the gate, and
lifted her hand to one of them. Laban answered to her
signal.
"Where is Oak staying?"
"Across the valley at Nest Cottage!"
"Jump on the bay mare, and ride across, and say he
must return instantly -- that I say so."
Tall scrambled off to the field, and in two minutes
was on Poll, the bay, bare-backed, and with only a
halter by way of rein. He diminished down the
Far From the Madding Crowd |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: here and there, by dead-gold lines. These panels were framed in relief
with figures of children playing with fantastic animals, among which
the light danced and floated, touching here a sketch by Bixiou, that
maker of caricatures, there the cast of an angel holding a vessel of
holy water (presented by Francois Souchet), farther on a coquettish
painting of Joseph Bridau, a gloomy picture of a Spanish alchemist by
Hippolyte Schinner, an autograph of Lord Byron to Lady Caroline Lamb,
framed in carved ebony, while, hanging opposite as a species of
pendant, was a letter from Napoleon to Josephine. All these things
were placed about without the slightest symmetry, but with almost
imperceptible art. On the chimney-piece, of exquisitely carved oak,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Just Folks by Edgar A. Guest: When they know that good old Santa has begun to pack his sleigh.
The Family's Homely Man
There never was a family without its homely man,
With legs a little longer than the ordinary plan,
An' a shock of hair that brush an' comb can't ever straighten out,
An' hands that somehow never seem to know what they're about;
The one with freckled features and a nose that looks as though
It was fashioned by the youngsters from a chunk of mother's dough.
You know the man I'm thinking of, the homely one an' plain,
That fairly oozes kindness like a rosebush dripping rain.
His face is never much to see, but back of it there lies
Just Folks |
