| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil: In darts invenom'd and in poison skill'd.
Then Clytius fell beneath his fatal spear,
And Creteus, whom the Muses held so dear:
He fought with courage, and he sung the fight;
Arms were his bus'ness, verses his delight.
The Trojan chiefs behold, with rage and grief,
Their slaughter'd friends, and hasten their relief.
Bold Mnestheus rallies first the broken train,
Whom brave Seresthus and his troop sustain.
To save the living, and revenge the dead,
Against one warrior's arms all Troy they led.
Aeneid |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: steward, was built a few years before the Revolution. It stood in the
centre of a large garden, one wall of which adjoined the court-yard of
the stables and offices of the chateau itself. Formerly its chief
entrance was on the main road to the village. But after the count's
father bought the building, he closed that entrance and united the
place with his own property.
The house, built of freestone, in the style of the period of Louis XV.
(it is enough to say that its exterior decoration consisted of a stone
drapery beneath the windows, as in the colonnades of the Place Louis
XV., the flutings of which were stiff and ungainly), had on the
ground-floor a fine salon opening into a bedroom, and a dining-room
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: languid had grown the soul that was melted within me. The west wind
had slackened the springs of my intelligence. A cold gray light poured
down from the heavens, and the murky clouds that passed overhead gave
a boding look to the land; all these things, together with the
immensity of the sea, said to me, "Die to-day or die to-morrow, still
must we not die?" And then--I wandered on, musing on the doubtful
future, on my blighted hopes. Gnawed by these gloomy thoughts, I
turned mechanically into the convent church, with the gray towers that
loomed like ghosts though the sea mists. I looked round with no
kindling of the imagination at the forest of columns, at the slender
arches set aloft upon the leafy capitals, a delicate labyrinth of
|
