| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kenilworth by Walter Scott: cannot yet be; and these dear but stolen interviews are all I can
give to the loveliest and the best beloved of her sex."
"But WHY can it not be?" urged the Countess, in the softest
tones of persuasion--"why can it not immediately take place--this
more perfect, this uninterrupted union, for which you say you
wish, and which the laws of God and man alike command? Ah! did
you but desire it half as much as you say, mighty and favoured as
you are, who or what should bar your attaining your wish?"
The Earl's brow was overcast.
"Amy," he said, "you speak of what you understand not. We that
toil in courts are like those who climb a mountain of loose sand
Kenilworth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: Pyramids; and the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was
mainly useful to lodge one's descendants in, after they too were
dust. Yet the Pyramid-instinct was the one which had made the
world, made man, and caused his fugitive joys to linger like
fading frescoes on imperishable walls ....
XXI
ON the drive back from her dinner at the Nouveau Luxe, events
had followed the course foreseen by Susy.
She had promised Strefford to seek legal advice about her
divorce, and he had kissed her; and the promise had been easier
to make than she had expected, the kiss less difficult to
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil
creek, - to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the
thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades,
crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles,
and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and
thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing
to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, - lying there
moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor
in the Desert could not seem more remote from life, - the cool
breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half-
sunken pillars, - why should I tell of these things, that I should
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
