| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: an exclamation broke from him, partly because the man was no longer
there, partly because he felt a strange painful sensation such as our
imagination might take for an effect of poison.
The pen that Melmoth had handled sent the same sickening heat through
him that an emetic produces. But it seemed impossible to Castanier
that the Englishman should have guessed his crime. His inward qualms
he attributed to the palpitation of the heart that, according to
received ideas, was sure to follow at once on such a "turn" as the
stranger had given him.
"The devil take it; I am very stupid. Providence is watching over me;
for if that brute had come round to see my gentleman to-morrow, my
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: in Fourteen Island Group, and hadn't had the wit to stay there
and drown, but came on deck, and given drunken orders, and
lost six lives--I could understand your talking then! There,' he
said more quietly, 'that's my yarn, and now you know it. It's a
pretty one for the father of a family. Five men and a woman
murdered. Yes, there was a woman on board, and hadn't no
business to be either. Guess I sent her to Hell, if there is such
a place. I never dared go home again; and the wife and the little
ones went to England to her father's place. I don't know what's
come to them,' he added, with a bitter shrug.
'Thank you, captain,' said Herrick. 'I never liked you better.'
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: course be banished for ever, and consequently along with it those
grievous prejudices of education which, under the names of
conscience, honour, justice, and the like, are so apt to disturb
the peace of human minds, and the notions whereof are so hard to be
eradicated by right reason or free-thinking, sometimes during the
whole course of our lives.
Here first I observe how difficult it is to get rid of a phrase
which the world has once grown fond of, though the occasion that
first produced it be entirely taken away. For some years past, if
a man had but an ill-favoured nose, the deep thinkers of the age
would, some way or other contrive to impute the cause to the
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