| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Chouans by Honore de Balzac: could raise their muskets and take aim he had struck them a blow with
his whip which felled them, and rushed away. A terrible discharge of
fire-arms from the woods just above the place where the Chouan had
been sitting brought down six or eight soldiers. Marche-a-Terre, at
whom several men had fired without touching him, vanished into the
woods after climbing the slope with the agility of a wild-cat; as he
did so his sabots rolled into the ditch and his feet were seen to be
shod with the thick, hobnailed boots always worn by the Chouans.
At the first cries uttered by the Chouans, the conscripts sprang into
the woods to the right like a flock of birds taking flight at the
approach of a man.
The Chouans |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: the founder of Troy. See Virg. Aen. b. viii. 134. as referred to
by Dante in treatise "De Monarchia," lib. ii. "Electra, scilicet,
nata magni nombris regis Atlantis, ut de ambobus testimonium
reddit poeta noster in octavo ubi Aeneas ad Avandrum sic ait
"Dardanus Iliacae," &c.
v. 125. Julia.] The daughter of Julius Caesar, and wife of
Pompey.
v. 126. The Soldan fierce.] Saladin or Salaheddin, the rival
of Richard coeur de lion. See D'Herbelot, Bibl. Orient. and
Knolles's Hist. of the Turks p. 57 to 73 and the Life of Saladin,
by Bohao'edin Ebn Shedad, published by Albert Schultens, with a
The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: with a touch of pride in his voice.
We had now reached the southernmost extremity of the
great ice barrier. It ended abruptly in a sheer wall thousands
of feet high at the base of which stretched a level valley,
broken here and there by low rolling hills and little clumps
of forest, and with tiny rivers formed by the melting of the
ice barrier at its base.
Once we passed far above what seemed to be a deep
canyon-like rift stretching from the ice wall on the north
across the valley as far as the eye could reach. "That is the
bed of the River Iss," said Xodar. "It runs far beneath the
The Gods of Mars |
