| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: displaying at the root of the petals a ring of brilliant turquoise
beads. That is the commonest of all the Actiniae
(Mesembryanthemum); you may have him when and where you will: but
if you will search those rocks somewhat closer, you will find even
more gorgeous species than him. See in that pool some dozen large
ones, in full bloom, and quite six inches across, some of them. If
their cousins whom we found just now were like Chrysanthemums,
these are like quilled Dahlias. Their arms are stouter and shorter
in proportion than those of the last species, but their colour is
equally brilliant. One is a brilliant blood-red; another a
delicate sea-blue striped with pink; but most have the disc and the
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: carriage. A cry of horror burst from him but Melmoth gave him a
glance, and again the sound died in his throat.
"Keep your eyes on the stage, and be quiet!" said the Englishman.
In another moment Castanier saw himself flung into prison at the
Conciergerie; and in the fifth act of the drama, entitled The Cashier,
he saw himself, in three months' time, condemned to twenty years of
penal servitude. Again a cry broke from him. He was exposed upon the
Place du Palais-de-Justice, and the executioner branded him with a
red-hot iron. Then came the last scene of all; among some sixty
convicts in the prison yard of the Bicetre, he was awaiting his turn
to have the irons riveted on his limbs.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: organization of the non-voting classes for the overthrow of Tammany
Hall. Every phase of civilisation or barbarism creates its own
conversational currency. The weather, like the old Spanish dollar,
is the only coin that passes everywhere.
But our Indians did not carry much small change about them. They
were dark, silent chaps, soon talked out; and then they sat sucking
their pipes before the fire, (as dumb as their own wooden effigies
in front of a tobacconist's shop,) until the spirit moved them, and
they vanished in their canoe down the dark lake. Our own guides
were very different. They were as full of conversation as a
spruce-tree is of gum. When all shallower themes were exhausted
|
