| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: us any longer? Leave poor Clifford and me in peace. Neither of
us desires anything better!"
"It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house,"
continued the Judge. "Do not act like a madwoman, Hepzibah! I am
his only friend, and an all-powerful one. Has it never occurred
to you,--are you so blind as not to have seen,--that, without not
merely my consent, but my efforts, my representations, the exertion
of my whole influence, political, official, personal, Clifford
would never have been what you call free? Did you think his release
a triumph over me? Not so, my good cousin; not so, by any means!
The furthest possible from that! No; but it was the accomplishment
House of Seven Gables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Frances Waldeaux by Rebecca Davis: good traits. She is not unlike my own mother."
George said nothing. God forbid that he should tell her,
even by a look, that she and her mother were of a caste
different from his own.
But he was bored to the soul by the difference; he was
tired of her ignorances, which she showed every minute,
of her ghastly, unclean knowledges--which she never
showed.
They came into the courtyard of the Chateau de la Motte,
the ancient castle of the Breton dukes, which is now an
inn. The red sunset flamed up behind the sad little town
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: the time, none the less, he took his profit where it seemed most to
crowd on him, having in his pocket the portable sophistries about
the nature of the artist's task. Observation too was a kind of
work and experience a kind of success; London dinners were all
material and London ladies were fruitful toil. "No one has the
faintest conception of what I'm trying for," he said to me, "and
not many have read three pages that I've written; but I must dine
with them first - they'll find out why when they've time." It was
rather rude justice perhaps; but the fatigue had the merit of being
a new sort, while the phantasmagoric town was probably after all
less of a battlefield than the haunted study. He once told me that
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