| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: through so many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have
realised to its full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me
not merely a figure of speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow
I might die. It is scarcely two months since I came back from
the grave: is it worth while to be anything but radiantly glad?
Of all things that life or perhaps my temperament has given me I
prize the gift of laughter as beyond price."
Her desire, always, was to be "a wild free thing of the air like
the birds, with a song in my heart." A spirit of too much fire
in too frail a body, it was rarely that her desire was fully
granted. But in Italy she found what she could not find in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: him back to the path of virtue; not by false professions of love,
and not by pretended remorse, but by mitigating my habitual
coldness of manner, and commuting my frigid civility into kindness
wherever an opportunity occurred; and not only was I beginning to
think so, but I had already begun to act upon the thought - and
what was the result? No answering spark of kindness, no awakening
penitence, but an unappeasable ill-humour, and a spirit of
tyrannous exaction that increased with indulgence, and a lurking
gleam of self-complacent triumph at every detection of relenting
softness in my manner, that congealed me to marble again as often
as it recurred; and this morning he finished the business:- I think
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: Seraphita passed her hand across her eyes and then she said,
smiling:--
"You are very thoughtful to-night, gentlemen. You treat Minna and me
as though we were men to whom you must talk politics or commerce;
whereas we are young girls, and you ought to tell us tales while you
drink your tea. That is what we do, Monsieur Wilfrid, in our long
Norwegian evenings. Come, dear pastor, tell me some Saga that I have
not heard,--that of Frithiof, the chronicle that you believe and have
so often promised me. Tell us the story of the peasant lad who owned
the ship that talked and had a soul. Come! I dream of the frigate
Ellida, the fairy with the sails young girls should navigate!"
Seraphita |
