| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: Stanislas chose the more remote peril.
"All right. To-morrow morning," he said, thinking that the matter
might be arranged somehow or other.
The three went back to the room. Everybody scanned their faces as they
came in; Chatelet was smiling, M. de Bargeton looked exactly as if he
were in his own house, but Stanislas looked ghastly pale. At the sight
of his face, some of the women here and there guessed the nature of
the conference, and the whisper, "They are going to fight!" circulated
from ear to ear. One-half of the room was of the opinion that
Stanislas was in the wrong, his white face and his demeanor convicted
him of a lie; the other half admired M. de Bargeton's attitude.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: between these two men marks a great enfranchisement. With
Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended
curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This
is a trite thing to say; but trite things are often very
indefinitely comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as
far as it regards the technical change that came over modern
prose romance, has never perhaps been explained with any
clearness.
To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two
sets of conventions upon which plays and romances are
respectively based. The purposes of these two arts are so
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: curiosity had brought him from distant countries, to an intimacy
with the great officers and frequent conversation with the Bassa
himself.
He was at first inclined to believe that the man must be pleased
with his own condition whom all approached with reverence and heard
with obedience, and who had the power to extend his edicts to a
whole kingdom. "There can be no pleasure," said he, "equal to that
of feeling at once the joy of thousands all made happy by wise
administration. Yet, since by the law of subordination this
sublime delight can be in one nation but the lot of one, it is
surely reasonable to think that there is some satisfaction more
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