| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: wittiest of men:-
"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." -
The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.
The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn't think the wit
meant any irreverence. It was only another way of saying, Paris is
a heavenly place after New York or Boston.
A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they
call John, - evidently a stranger, - said there was one more wise
man's saying that he had heard; it was about our place, but he
didn't know who said it. - A civil curiosity was manifested by the
company to hear the fourth wise saying. I heard him distinctly
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: Mr. Hunt and his companions, and the joyful meeting of the
various scattered bands of adventurers at Astoria. The colors
were hoisted; the guns, great and small, were fired; there was a
feast of fish, of beaver, and venison, which relished well with
men who had so long been glad to revel on horse flesh and dogs'
meat; a genial allowance of grog was issued, to increase the
general animation, and the festivities wound up, as usual, with a
grand dance at night, by the Canadian voyageurs. *
*The distance from St. Louis to Astoria, by the route travelled
by Hunt and M'Kenzie, was upwards of thirty-five hundred miles,
though in a direct line it does not exceed eighteen hundred.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: distinctly visible; there were deep furrows in his forehead. In
the fourth year of his residence in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-
Genevieve he was no longer like his former self. The hale
vermicelli manufacturer, sixty-two years of age, who had looked
scarce forty, the stout, comfortable, prosperous tradesman, with
an almost bucolic air, and such a brisk demeanor that it did you
good to look at him; the man with something boyish in his smile,
had suddenly sunk into his dotage, and had become a feeble,
vacillating septuagenarian.
The keen, bright blue eyes had grown dull, and faded to a steel-
gray color; the red inflamed rims looked as though they had shed
Father Goriot |
