| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: delicate films of herself, that must gradually, she being gone,
draw together into a separate individuality an image not quite
bodiless, that replaces her in her absence, as the holy
Theocrite was replaced by the angel. If there are ghosts of the
dead, why not ghosts of the living also?" This lover's fancy so
pleased him that he brought to bear upon it the whole force of
his imagination, and it grew stronger day by day. To him,
thenceforth, the house was haunted, and all its floating traces
of herself visible or invisible,--from the ribbon that he saw
entangled in the window-blind to every intangible and fancied
atom she had imparted to the atmosphere,--came at last to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: It was night when we arrived at the house in Königstrasse. I expected
to find all quiet there, my uncle in bed as was his custom, and
Martha giving her last touches with the feather brush.
But I had not taken into account the Professor's impatience. I found
him shouting- and working himself up amidst a crowd of porters and
messengers who were all depositing various loads in the passage. Our
old servant was at her wits' end.
"Come, Axel, come, you miserable wretch," my uncle cried from as far
off as he could see me. "Your boxes are not packed, and my papers are
not arranged; where's the key of my carpet bag? and what have you
done with my gaiters?"
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch as the story is nearly over
before he has any notion what it is all about; but really it puts
the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obliged to fashion his
whole sentence complete in his brain before he starts to speak.
This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartar etymology.
There are in Japanese no relative pronouns and no temporal
conjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive
events. The want of these words precludes the admission of
afterthoughts. Postscripts in speech are impossible. The functions
of relatives are performed by position, explanatory or continuative
clauses being made to precede directly the word they affect.
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