| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping
in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it;
waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again,
but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so,
the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation
that drew from Douglas--not immediately, but later in the evening--
a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention.
Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw
he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself
something to produce and that we should only have to wait.
We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: not publishing, "The Franciscans," a long satire, compared to which
the "Somnium" was bland and merciful. The storm rose. Cardinal
Beaten, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the king, and then, of
course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor souls; so, knowing
James's avarice, he fled to England, through freebooters and
pestilence.
There he found, he says, "men of both factions being burned on the
same day and in the same fire"--a pardonable exaggeration--"by Henry
VIII., in his old age more intent on his own safety than on the
purity of religion." So to his beloved France he went again, to
find his enemy Beaten ambassador at Paris. The capital was too hot
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: Emperor, they would not come to extremities, or proceed to open
force. I laid some stress upon the kindness which the viceroy of
Tigre had shown to us, and in particular to me; but was soon
convinced that those hopes had no real foundation, for he was one of
the most violent of our persecutors. He seized upon all our lands,
and, advancing with his troops to Fremona, blocked up the town. The
army had not been stationed there long before they committed all
sorts of disorders; so that one day a Portuguese, provoked beyond
his temper at the insolence of some of them, went out with his four
sons, and, wounding several of them, forced the rest back to their
camp.
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