| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton
wonderment: it met him there - and this was the image under which
he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled
and flushed with it - very much as he might have been met by some
strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the
dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite
hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve
it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind
which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a
room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed
start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: managed this by means of a long pole.
The canoe touched the shore. The engineer leaped in first, and found, on
examining the rope, that it had been really worn through by rubbing against
the rocks.
"Well," said the reporter to him, in a low voice, "this is a strange
thing."
"Strange indeed!" returned Cyrus Harding.
Strange or not, it was very fortunate. Herbert, the reporter, Neb, and
Pencroft, embarked in turn. There was no doubt about the rope having been
worn through, but the astonishing part of the affair was, that the boat
should arrive just at the moment when the settlers were there to seize it
The Mysterious Island |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: be foreigners."
"We have never met any of that sort."
("Yes," I thought, "but you really want to. Didn't you say you hoped I
was one? Away down deep there's a cry of kinship in you; and that you
don't hear it, and that we don't hear it, has been as much our fault as
yours. I see that very well now, but I'm afraid to tell you so, yet.")
What I said was: "We're handing the 'sacred trust' down, I hope."
"I understood you to say you weren't."
"I said we were not handing 'it' down."
I didn't wonder that irritation again moulded her reply. "You must excuse
a daughter of Dixie if she finds the words of a son of the Union beyond
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