| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: TO THE EDITOR OF THE KEEPSAKE.
You have asked me, sir, to point out a subject for the pencil,
and I feel the difficulty of complying with your request,
although I am not certainly unaccustomed to literary composition,
or a total stranger to the stores of history and tradition, which
afford the best copies for the painter's art. But although SICUT
PICTURA POESIS is an ancient and undisputed axiom--although
poetry and painting both address themselves to the same object of
exciting the human imagination, by presenting to it pleasing or
sublime images of ideal scenes--yet the one conveying itself
through the ears to the understanding, and the other applying
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: be?"
"Yes; I hoped for a greater effect last evening. We had two or
three people, but he scarcely opened his mouth."
"He'll be all the better to-night," I opined after a moment. Then
I pursued: "What particular importance do you attach to the idea
of her being impressed?"
Adelaide turned her mild pale eyes on me as for rebuke of my
levity. "Why the importance of her being as happy as WE are!"
I'm afraid that at this my levity grew. "Oh that's a happiness
almost too great to wish a person!" I saw she hadn't yet in her
mind what I had in mine, and at any rate the visitor's actual bliss
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: a bad business through!"
She lowered her voice. "IS it a bad business--for
May?"
He stood in the window, drumming against the raised
sash, and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness
with which she had spoken her cousin's name.
"For that's the thing we've always got to think of--
haven't we--by your own showing?" she insisted.
"My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still
on the sea.
"Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought
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