| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: see that they had not only lost their amiability but had ceased to
believe in themselves. He could also see that if Mrs. Moreen was
trying to get people to take her children she might be regarded as
closing the hatches for the storm. But Morgan would be the last
she would part with.
One winter afternoon - it was a Sunday - he and the boy walked far
together in the Bois de Boulogne. The evening was so splendid, the
cold lemon-coloured sunset so clear, the stream of carriages and
pedestrians so amusing and the fascination of Paris so great, that
they stayed out later than usual and became aware that they should
have to hurry home to arrive in time for dinner. They hurried
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: any other cause at work in the development of mankind tending to
increase veracity? The answer to the first question has all the
simplicity of a plain negative. No such pleasing concomitance of
characteristics is observable to-day, or has been presented in the
past. Permitting, however, the dead past to bury its shortcomings
in oblivion, let us look at the world as we find it. We observe,
then, that the religious spirit is quite as strong in Asia as it is
in Europe; if anything, that at the present time it is rather
stronger. The average Brahman, Mahometan, or Buddhist is quite as
devout as the ordinary Roman Catholic or Presbyterian. If he is
somewhat less given to propagandism, he is not a whit less regardful
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: "Now you shall judge of my way of expressing in sound a great idea,
for which poetry could find no adequate expression in words."
Gambara sat down to the piano with an absorbed gaze, and his wife
brought him the mass of papers forming his score; but he did not open
them.
"The whole opera," said he, "is founded on a bass, as on a fruitful
soil. Mahomet was to have a majestic bass voice, and his wife
necessarily had a contralto. Kadijah was quite old--twenty! Attention!
This is the overture. It begins with an /andante/ in C major, triple
time. Do you hear the sadness of the ambitious man who is not
satisfied with love? Then, through his lamentation, by a transition to
Gambara |
