| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: If you only sailed by day,
With a fair wind all the way,
More than a month would you sail.
"I own six hundred reindeer,
With sheep and swine beside;
I have tribute from the Finns,
Whalebone and reindeer-skins,
And ropes of walrus-hide.
"I ploughed the land with horses,
But my heart was ill at ease,
For the old seafaring men
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: "Here, Pencroft, this will please you."
Pencroft looked attentively at the plant, covered with long silky hair,
the leaves being clothed with soft down.
"What's that, captain?" asked Pencroft. "Is it tobacco?"
"No," replied Harding, "it is wormwood; Chinese wormwood to the learned,
but to us it will be tinder."
When the wormwood was properly dried it provided them with a very
inflammable substance, especially afterwards when the engineer had
impregnated it with nitrate of potash, of which the island possessed
several beds, and which is in truth saltpeter.
The colonists had a good supper that evening. Neb prepared some agouti
The Mysterious Island |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: clerks, Canadian voyageurs, Sandwich Islanders, and American
hunters; and they embarked in two barges and ten canoes.
They had scarcely got under way, when John Day, the Kentucky
hunter, became restless and uneasy, and extremely wayward in his
deportment. This caused surprise, for in general he was
remarkable for his cheerful, manly deportment. It was supposed
that the recollection of past sufferings might harass his mind in
undertaking to retrace the scenes where they had been
experienced. As the expedition advanced, however, his agitation
increased. He began to talk wildly and incoherently, and to show
manifest symptoms of derangement.
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