| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: decrees. But Armand must be saved at any cost; he, first of all, for
he was her brother, had been mother, father, friend to her ever since
she, a tiny babe, had lost both her parents. To think of Armand dying
a traitor's death on the guillotine was too horrible even to dwell
upon--impossible in fact. That could never be, never. . . . As for
the stranger, the hero. . .well! there, let Fate decide. Marguerite
would redeem her brother's life at the hands of the relentless enemy,
then let that cunning Scarlet Pimpernel extricate himself after that.
Perhaps--vaguely--Marguerite hoped that the daring plotter,
who for so many months had baffled an army of spies, would still
manage to evade Chauvelin and remain immune to the end.
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling: 'The Spanisher gave us his broadside as he went about. They all
fell short except one that smack-smooth hit the rail behind my
back, an' I felt most won'erful cold.
'"Be you hit anywhere to signify?" he says. "Come over to me."
'"O Lord, Mus' Drake," I says, "my legs won't move," and
that was the last I spoke for months.'
'Why? What had happened?' cried Dan and Una together.
'The rail had jarred me in here like.' Simon reached behind him
clumsily. 'From my shoulders down I didn't act no shape. Frankie
carried me piggyback to my Aunt's house, and I lay bed-rid and
tongue-tied while she rubbed me day and night, month in and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we
see the laws of prosody to have one common purpose: to keep
alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously followed;
to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and to
balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader,
that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally
prevail.
The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too,
we write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for
the prose phrase is greatly longer and is much more
nonchalantly uttered than the group in verse; so that not
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