| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: Adelaide went into a room next the drawing-room, where she no
doubt slept, and returned bringing her mother a cashmere shawl,
which when new must have been very costly; the pattern was
Indian; but it was old, faded and full of darns, and matched the
furniture. Madame Leseigneur wrapped herself in it very
artistically, and with the readiness of an old woman who wishes
to make her words seem truth. The young girl ran lightly off to
the lumber-room and reappeared with a bundle of small wood, which
she gallantly threw on the fire to revive it.
It would be rather difficult to reproduce the conversation which
followed among these three persons. Hippolyte, guided by the tact
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: clime; while the reveries of a feverish imagination continually
sport themselves in gardens full of aromatic shrubs, which cloy
while they delight, and weaken the sense of pleasure they gratify.
The heaven of fancy, below or beyond the stars, in this life, or
in those ever-smiling regions surrounded by the unmarked ocean of
futurity, have an insipid uniformity which palls. Poets have
imagined scenes of bliss; but, sencing out sorrow, all the extatic
emotions of the Soul, and even its grandeur, seem to be equally
excluded. We dose over the unruffled lake, and long to scale the
rocks which fence the happy valley of contentment, though serpents
hiss in the pathless desert, and danger lurks in the unexplored
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glinda of Oz by L. Frank Baum: carefully. "But are you sure she will not hurt me, or
try to transform me?"
"She may change your form," replied the goldfish,
"but do not worry if that happens, for we can break
that enchantment easily. You may be sure that nothing
will harm you, so you must not be frightened at
anything you see or hear."
Now Ervic was as brave as any ordinary young man, and
he knew the fishes who spoke to him were truthful and
to be relied upon, nevertheless he experienced a
strange sinking of the heart as he picked up the kettle
Glinda of Oz |
