| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: him. This friend, the head of a rather important house in Nuremburg,
was a stout worthy German, a man of taste and erudition, above all a
man of pipes, having a fine, broad, Nuremburgian face, with a square
open forehead adorned by a few sparse locks of yellowish hair. He was
the type of the sons of that pure and noble Germany, so fertile in
honorable natures, whose peaceful manners and morals have never been
lost, even after seven invasions.
This stranger laughed with simplicity, listened attentively, and drank
remarkably well, seeming to like champagne as much perhaps as he liked
his straw-colored Johannisburger. His name was Hermann, which is that
of most Germans whom authors bring upon their scene. Like a man who
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: the present radius of the earth's orbit. We may well believe
Professor Tyndall, therefore, when he tells us that all the solar
radiance we receive is less than a two-billionth part of what is
sent flying through the desert regions of space. Some of the
immense residue of course hits other planets stationed in the way
of it, and is utilized upon their surfaces; but the planets, all
put together, stop so little of the total quantity that our
startling illustration is not materially altered by taking them
into the account. Now this two-billionth part of the solar
radiance poured out from moment to moment suffices to blow every
wind, to raise every cloud, to drive every engine, to build up
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: the original building, and find one being on whom time seems to
have made little impression; for the Aunt Margaret of to-day
bears the same proportional age to the Aunt Margaret of my early
youth that the boy of ten years old does to the man of (by'r
Lady!) some fifty-six years. The old lady's invariable costume
has doubtless some share in confirming one in the opinion that
time has stood still with Aunt Margaret.
The brown or chocolate-coloured silk gown, with ruffles of the
same stuff at the elbow, within which are others of Mechlin lace;
the black silk gloves, or mitts; the white hair combed back upon
a roll; and the cap of spotless cambric, which closes around the
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