| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: from the gloomy hills, the prairie, and the river, which he never
was to see again. His hope accomplished could not have looked at
him with surer content and fulfilment. He turned away,
ungrateful and moody. Long afterwards he remembered the calm and
brightness which his hand had not been raised to make, and
understood the meaning of its promise.
He went to work now in earnest: he had to work for his
bread-and-butter, you understand? Restless, impatient at first;
but we will forgive him that: you yourself were not altogether
submissive, perhaps, when the slow-built expectation of life was
destroyed by some chance, as you called it, no more controllable
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Talisman by Walter Scott: The Vain productions of a feverish dream. ASTOLPHO, A ROMANCE.
When the Knight of the Leopard awoke from his long and profound
repose, he found himself in circumstances so different from those
in which he had lain down to sleep, that he doubted whether he
was not still dreaming, or whether the scene had not been changed
by magic. Instead of the damp grass, he lap on a couch of more
than Oriental luxury; and some kind hands had, during his repose,
stripped him of the cassock of chamois which he wore under his
armour, and substituted a night-dress of the finest linen and a
loose gown of silk. He had been canopied only by the palm-trees
of the desert, but now he lay beneath a silken pavilion, which
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: simplicity of a child: for that was what I dreamed to be the
innocence of a man of genius. And now you have spoiled my
treasure! But I forgive you; you live in Paris and, as you say,
there is always a man within a poet.
Because I tell you this will you think me some little girl who
cultivates a garden-full of illusions? You, who are witty and
wise, have you not guessed that when Mademoiselle d'Este received
your pedantic lesson she said to herself: "No, dear poet, my first
letter was not the pebble which a vagabond child flings about the
highway to frighten the owner of the adjacent fruit-trees, but a
net carefully and prudently thrown by a fisherman seated on a rock
Modeste Mignon |
