| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: For a moment she said nothing more, and I left my own words to suggest
to her what they might. I half-expected her to say, coldly enough,
that if I had been disappointed we need not continue the discussion,
and this in spite of the fact that I believed her now to have in her mind
(however it had come there) what would have told her that my disappointment
was natural. But to my extreme surprise she ended by observing:
"If you don't think we have treated you well enough perhaps we can discover
some way of treating you better." This speech was somehow so incongruous
that it made me laugh again, and I excused myself by saying that she talked
as if I were a sulky boy, pouting in the corner, to be "brought round."
I had not a grain of complaint to make; and could anything have exceeded Miss
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: Why didn't she have him watched? He must have been mad.'
The doctor stared at me. 'I don't know what you mean,' he said.
'Well,' I cried, 'if a mother knows that her son is going to commit
suicide - '
'Suicide!' he answered. 'Poor Erskine did not commit suicide. He
died of consumption. He came here to die. The moment I saw him I
knew that there was no hope. One lung was almost gone, and the
other was very much affected. Three days before he died he asked
me was there any hope. I told him frankly that there was none, and
that he had only a few days to live. He wrote some letters, and
was quite resigned, retaining his senses to the last.'
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: changed to:
Than are as yet a picture in our vision.
About the author: Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1869-1935.
From the Biographical Notes of "The Second Book of Modern Verse" (1919, 1920),
edited by Jessie B. Rittenhouse:
Robinson, Edwin Arlington. Born at Head Tide, Maine, Dec. 22, 1869.
Educated at Harvard University. Mr. Robinson is a psychological poet
of great subtlety; his poems are usually studies of types
and he has given us a remarkable series of portraits. He is recognized
as one of the finest and most distinguished poets of our time.
His successive volumes are: "Children of the Night", 1897;
|
