| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them
welcome to a little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in
the way of French cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless.
Real turtle, we understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig,
English mutton, good roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind,
fit for substantial country gentlemen, as these honorable persons
mostly are. The delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored
by a brand of old Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons.
It is the Juno brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle
might; a bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid,
worth more than liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran
House of Seven Gables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: "Material faculties! Reflect on this juxtaposition of words. Is
not this a problem as insoluble as that of the first communication
of motion to matter--an unsounded gulf of which the difficulties
were transposed rather than removed by Newton's system? Again, the
universal assimilation of light by everything that exists on earth
demands a new study of our globe. The same animal differs in the
tropics of India and in the North. Under the angular or the
vertical incidence of the sun's rays nature is developed the same,
but not the same; identical in its principles, but totally
dissimilar in its outcome. The phenomenon that amazes our eyes in
the zoological world when we compare the butterflies of Brazil
Louis Lambert |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: love of the "progressive and intelligent masses"! Titles, medals,
diplomas, a sort of legion of honor invented for the army of martyrs,
have followed each other with marvellous rapidity. Speculators in the
manufactured products of the intellect have developed a spice, a
ginger, all their own. From this have come premiums, forestalled
dividends, and that conscription of noted names which is levied
without the knowledge of the unfortunate writers who bear them, and
who thus find themselves actual co-operators in more enterprises than
there are days in the year; for the law, we may remark, takes no
account of the theft of a patronymic. Worse than all is the rape of
ideas which these caterers for the public mind, like the slave-
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