| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: fault, in part owing to historical veracity. Plenty of things in
real life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half
of art to select from realities those which contain possibilities
of poetry.
In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my
finances obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you
know, regard those airy perches on the top of the coach as the
best seats; and for the first few miles I discovered abundance of
excellent reasons for justifying the opinion of our neighbors. A
young fellow, apparently in somewhat better circumstances, who
came to take the seat beside me from preference, listened to my
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Enchanted Island of Yew by L. Frank Baum: poisoned cup."
Instantly a dwarf came near, bearing a beautiful golden goblet in his
crooked hands.
"Drink!" he said, an evil leer upon his face.
The girl well knew this goblet contained a vile poison, one drop of
which on her tongue would cause death; so she hesitated, trembling and
shrinking from the ordeal.
Prince Marvel looked into her sweet face with pitying eyes, and
stepping quickly to her side, took her hand in his.
"Now drink!" he said, smiling upon her; "the poison will not hurt you."
She drank obediently, while the dwarf chuckled with awful glee and the
The Enchanted Island of Yew |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: these canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they
brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the
fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal
into another, and to the city. Twice in the year they gathered the fruits
of the earth--in winter having the benefit of the rains of heaven, and in
summer the water which the land supplied by introducing streams from the
canals.
As to the population, each of the lots in the plain had to find a leader
for the men who were fit for military service, and the size of a lot was a
square of ten stadia each way, and the total number of all the lots was
sixty thousand. And of the inhabitants of the mountains and of the rest of
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