| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: on the minds of the Montpellier students; and still more influence--
and that not altogether a good one--must Rabelais's lighter talk
have had, as he lounged--so the story goes--in his dressing-gown
upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the cattle-
drivers off the Cevennes, and the villagers who came in to sell
their olives and their grapes, their vinegar and their vine-twig
faggots, as they do unto this day. To him may be owing much of the
sound respect for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt
for the superstition around them, which is notable in that group of
great naturalists who were boys in Montpellier at that day.
Rabelais seems to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: important things done. He liked to keep the
place up, but he never got round to doing odd
jobs until he had to neglect more pressing work
to attend to them. In the middle of the wheat
harvest, when the grain was over-ripe and every
hand was needed, he would stop to mend fences
or to patch the harness; then dash down to the
field and overwork and be laid up in bed for a
week. The two boys balanced each other, and
they pulled well together. They had been good
friends since they were children. One seldom
O Pioneers! |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: slipped into this page of the glorious book of his life.
When Madame de Listomere saw her husband ushering in Eugene she could
not help blushing. The young baron saw that sudden color. If the most
humble-minded man retains in the depths of his soul a certain conceit
of which he never rids himself, any more than a woman ever rids
herself of coquetry, who shall blame Eugene if he did say softly in
his own mind: "What! that fortress, too?" So thinking, he posed in his
cravat. Young men may not be grasping but they like to get a new coin
in their collection.
Monsieur de Listomere seized the "Gazette de France," which he saw on
the mantelpiece, and carried it to a window, to obtain, by
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