| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: personated in love and friendship, I conceive their refinements
were grounded upon reason, and that a little grain of the romance
is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human
nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that
is sordid, vicious, and low. If there were no other use in the
conversation of ladies, it is sufficient that it would lay a
restraint upon those odious topics of immodesty and indecencies,
into which the rudeness of our northern genius is so apt to fall.
And, therefore, it is observable in those sprightly gentlemen about
the town, who are so very dexterous at entertaining a vizard mask
in the park or the playhouse, that, in the company of ladies of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: jokes and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four
chairs, its overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of
nearly all else--these things wove round the occasion a spell to
which our hero unreservedly surrendered.
He liked the ingenuous compatriots--for two or three others soon
gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free
discriminations--involving references indeed, involving
enthusiasms and execrations that made him, as they said, sit up;
he liked above all the legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual
accommodation fairly raised to the romantic, that he soon read
into the scene. The ingenuous compatriots showed a candour, he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: amazement and curiosity.
"Yes," answered Paz, in a choking voice. "Such agility, such grace
under constant danger seems to me the height of triumph for a woman.
Yes, madame, Cinti and Malibran, Grisi and Taglioni, Pasta and
Ellsler, all who reign or have reigned on the stage, can't be
compared, to my mind, with Malaga, who can jump on or off a horse at
full gallop, or stand on the point of one foot and fall easily into
the saddle, and knit stockings, break eggs, and make an omelette with
the horse at full speed, to the admiration of the people,--the real
people, peasants and soldiers. Malaga, madame, is dexterity
personified; her little wrist or her little foot can rid her of three
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