| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: roof is all overgrown with weeds: a willow, an oak, and two
apple-trees lean their spreading branches against it. Through the
trees peep little windows with carved and white-washed shutters, which
project even into the street.
A very fine man, Ivan Ivanovitch! The commissioner of Poltava knows
him too. Dorosh Tarasovitch Pukhivotchka, when he leaves Khorola,
always goes to his house. And when Father Peter, the Protopope who
lives at Koliberdas, invites a few guests, he always says that he
knows of no one who so well fulfils all his Christian duties and
understands so well how to live as Ivan Ivanovitch.
How time flies! More than ten years have already passed since he
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: for neither he nor I was of an age for such indulgences. "But a
glass of ale you may have, and welcome," said I. He mopped and
mowed at me, and called me names; but he was glad to get the ale,
for all that; and presently we were set down at a table in the
front room of the inn, and both eating and drinking with a good
appetite.
Here it occurred to me that, as the landlord was a man of that
county, I might do well to make a friend of him. I offered him a
share, as was much the custom in those days; but he was far too
great a man to sit with such poor customers as Ransome and
myself, and he was leaving the room, when I called him back to
Kidnapped |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: more intelligible and familiar to us than one which is rare, and our
familiarity with it more than compensates for incorrectness or inaccuracy
in the use of it. Striking expressions also which have moved the hearts of
nations or are the precious stones and jewels of great authors partake of
the nature of idioms: they are taken out of the sphere of grammar and are
exempt from the proprieties of language. Every one knows that we often put
words together in a manner which would be intolerable if it were not
idiomatic. We cannot argue either about the meaning of words or the use of
constructions that because they are used in one connexion they will be
legitimate in another, unless we allow for this principle. We can bear to
have words and sentences used in new senses or in a new order or even a
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