| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: have voluntarily suffered; and that, in forcing her on such
a measure, General Tilney had acted neither honourably
nor feelingly--neither as a gentleman nor as a parent.
Why he had done it, what could have provoked him to such
a breach of hospitality, and so suddenly turned all his
partial regard for their daughter into actual ill will,
was a matter which they were at least as far from
divining as Catherine herself; but it did not oppress
them by any means so long; and, after a due course
of useless conjecture, that "it was a strange business,
and that he must be a very strange man," grew enough
Northanger Abbey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: be used sparingly. For, like some other men of genius of the Elizabethan
and Jacobean age, he outdid the capabilities of the language, and many of
the expressions which he introduced have been laid aside and have dropped
out of use. (b) A similar principle should be observed in the employment
of Scripture. Having a greater force and beauty than other language, and a
religious association, it disturbs the even flow of the style. It may be
used to reproduce in the translation the quaint effect of some antique
phrase in the original, but rarely; and when adopted, it should have a
certain freshness and a suitable 'entourage.' It is strange to observe
that the most effective use of Scripture phraseology arises out of the
application of it in a sense not intended by the author. (c) Another
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: jealous of every one, even of her brothers and sisters. Then, after
creating a desert about her, the strange girl accused all nature of
her unreal solitude and her wilful griefs. Strong in the experience of
her twenty years, she blamed fate, because, not knowing that the
mainspring of happiness is in ourselves, she demanded it of the
circumstances of life. She would have fled to the ends of the earth to
escape a marriage such as those of her two sisters, and nevertheless
her heart was full of horrible jealousy at seeing them married, rich,
and happy. In short, she sometimes led her mother--who was as much a
victim to her vagaries as Monsieur de Fontaine--to suspect that she
had a touch of madness.
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