| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: night one could sometimes hear the scream of the panther or the
howling of wolves. But soon the wilderness began to wear the
traces of a conventional smile. The desert blossomed a little--if
not as the rose, at least as the gilly-flower. Fields were
cleared, gardens planted; half a dozen log cabins were scattered
along the river; and the old house, having grown slowly and
somewhat irregularly for twenty years, came out, just before the
time of which I write, in a modest coat of paint and a broad-
brimmed piazza. But Virgil himself, the creator of the oasis--well
known of hunters and fishermen, dreaded of lazy guides and
quarrelsome lumbermen,--"Virge," the irascible, kind-hearted,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: until he had approached pretty nigh. Then, getting leisurely
upon her feet, and giving her head a gentle toss, she began to
move along at a moderate pace, often pausing just long enough
to crop a mouthful of grass. Cadmus loitered behind, whistling
idly to himself, and scarcely noticing the cow; until the
thought occurred to him, whether this could possibly be the
animal which, according to the oracle's response, was to serve
him for a guide. But he smiled at himself for fancying such a
thing. He could not seriously think that this was the cow,
because she went along so quietly, behaving just like any other
cow. Evidently she neither knew nor cared so much as a wisp of
Tanglewood Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: deficiency and found himself as firm as need be on the question of
the lamp and the file. He crossed the Alps at last and spent the
winter, the spring, the ensuing summer, in Italy, where still, at
the end of a twelvemonth, his task was unachieved. "Stick to it -
see it through": this general injunction of St. George's was good
also for the particular case. He applied it to the utmost, with
the result that when in its slow order the summer had come round
again he felt he had given all that was in him. This time he put
his papers into his portmanteau, with the address of his publisher
attached, and took his way northward.
He had been absent from London for two years - two years which,
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