| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself
made no reference to this passage of his life; it was an
adventure of which, for I think sufficient reasons, he
desired to bury the details. Of one thing we may be glad: in
after years he visited the poor girl's mother, and left her
with the impression that he was "a real warm-hearted chield."
Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set
out for Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend.
The town that winter was "agog with the ploughman poet."
Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair, "Duchess Gordon and all the
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: at the point I was talking about and ended miles away.
It must not be imagined that I was just repelled, ignored, left
to cherish a grievance. Not at all. My happiness was in the hands
of a larger, sweeter womanhood than I had ever imagined. Before
our marriage my own ardor had perhaps blinded me to much of this.
I was madly in love with not so much what was there as with
what I supposed to be there. Now I found an endlessly beautiful
undiscovered country to explore, and in it the sweetest wisdom
and understanding. It was as if I had come to some new place
and people, with a desire to eat at all hours, and no other
interests in particular; and as if my hosts, instead of merely
Herland |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: cousin, Pierrette Lorrain. Their father got possession of the Auffray
property after they left home, and the old man said little to any one
of his business affairs. They hardly remembered their aunt Lorrain. It
took an hour of genealogical discussion before they made her out to be
the younger sister of their own mother by the second marriage of their
grandfather Auffray. It immediately struck them that this second
marriage had been fatally injurious to their interests by dividing the
Auffray property between two daughters. In times past they had heard
their father, who was given to sneering, complain of it.
The brother and sister considered the application of the Lorrains from
the point of view of such reminiscences, which were not at all
|
