| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: which we could make out dimly the black mass of the largest beast
we had seen from across the way.
Although it was now practically dark, we had the game in our own
hands. From our low position the animal, once it fed forward from
behind the single small bush, would be plainly outlined against
the sky, and at ten yards I should be able to place my heavy
bullets properly, even in the dark. Therefore, quite easy in our
minds, we lay flat and rested. At the end of twenty seconds the
animal began to step forward. I levelled my double gun, ready to
press trigger the moment the shoulder appeared in the clear. Then
against the saffron sky emerged the ugly outline and two
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: flitting and ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what
exquisite verse the awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising
her eyes from the page to Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made
aware, by the light breaking through it, that a more delicate
intelligence than her own had caught a lambent flame from what
she read. One glow of this kind, however, was often the
precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when the
glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and
power, and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go
seeking his lost eyesight.
It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that
House of Seven Gables |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: misleading. Through philological criticism alone we know more of
the centuries of which no actual record has been preserved, than we
do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls. It can do for
us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics. It can
give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming. It
can do for us what History cannot do. It can tell us what man
thought before he learned how to write. You have asked me about
the influence of Criticism. I think I have answered that question
already; but there is this also to be said. It is Criticism that
makes us cosmopolitan. The Manchester school tried to make men
realise the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the commercial
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