| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: plantations had been made; the tenants paid for repairs, rates, and
taxes; the apple-trees were thirty-eight years old; and, to crown all,
his father was in treaty for two hundred acres of woodland just
outside the paternal park, which he intended to enclose with walls. No
hopes of a political career, no fame on earth, can compare with such
advantages as these.
Whether out of malice or design, Mme. de Sainte-Severe omitted to
mention that Gaston had an elder brother; nor did Gaston himself say a
word about him. But, at the same time, it is true that the brother was
consumptive, and to all appearance would shortly be laid in earth,
lamented and forgotten.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Four Arthurian Romances by Chretien DeTroyes: But it is not meet that I should pass on, from weariness and
exhaustion of tongue, without telling you the whole truth about
the garden, according as the story runs.
(Vv. 5739-5826.) (38) The garden had around it no wall or fence
except of air: yet, by a spell, the garden was on all sides so
shut in by the air that nothing could enter there any more than
if the garden were enclosed in iron, unless it flew in over the
top. And all through the summer and the winter, too, there were
flowers and ripe fruits there; and the fruit was of such a nature
that it could be eaten inside; the danger consisted in carrying
it out; for whoever should wish to carry out a little would never
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case,
there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been
looked at - well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must
keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune
which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see
my literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I
stood from the favour of the public.
II
The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has
counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner,
Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local
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