| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kenilworth by Walter Scott: shown some impatience during this conversation, "but of her
complexion--the colour of her hair, her features."
"Touching her complexion," answered the mercer, "I am not so
special certain, but I marked that her fan had an ivory handle,
curiously inlaid. And then again, as to the colour of her hair,
why, I can warrant, be its hue what it might, that she wore above
it a net of green silk, parcel twisted with gold."
"A most mercer-like memory!" said Lambourne. "The gentleman
asks him of the lady's beauty, and he talks of her fine clothes!"
"I tell thee," said the mercer, somewhat disconcerted, "I had
little time to look at her; for just as I was about to give her
Kenilworth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: intensely interested, watching the operation and giving me advice.
"There--it's all right now--a little more on the right--there--
now it's all off."
"Are you sure? No green left?" I anxiously asked.
"No, it's red all over now," she replied cheerfully.
"Let me get home," thought I, very much upset by this information,
"let me get home to my dear, uncritical, admiring babies, who accept
my nose as an example of what a nose should be, and whatever
its colour think it beautiful." And thrusting the handkerchief
back into the little girl's hands, I hurried away down the path.
She packed it away hastily, but it took some seconds for it was
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: the beach. The sky was cloudless, the sea without a ripple; others
might have thought them merely two blue surfaces, the one above the
other, but we--we who heard without the need of words, we who could
evoke between these two infinitudes the illusions that nourish youth,
--we pressed each other's hands at every change in the sheet of water
or the sheets of air, for we took those slight phenomena as the
visible translation of our double thought. Who has never tasted in
wedded love that moment of illimitable joy when the soul seems freed
from the trammels of flesh, and finds itself restored, as it were, to
the world whence it came? Are there not hours when feelings clasp each
other and fly upward, like children taking hands and running, they
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