| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: upon every page. Having placed our judgment thus upon record,
let us close with what charity we can, by remarking that even in this
volume there is some good to be found; for whenever the author talks
of his own country and lets Europe alone, he never fails to make
himself interesting, and not only interesting but instructive.
No one can read without benefit his occasional chapters and paragraphs,
about life in the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada;
about the Indians of the plains and deserts of the West,
and their cannibalism; about the raising of vegetables in kegs of
gunpowder by the aid of two or three teaspoons of guano; about the
moving of small arms from place to place at night in wheelbarrows
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking
feature than in this, that while in the revival all is
excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with
a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering
why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept
up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets,
the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say
and do their allotted parts whether they will or no.
This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring
by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival
may be known from a spurious reproduction.
Return of the Native |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: from any bit of flint which you or I ever saw among the hundreds
of thousands of broken bits of gravel which we tread on here all
day long; and here are some more bits like it, which came from the
same place--all very much the same shape, like rough knives or
razor blades; and here is a core of flint, the remaining part of a
large flint, from which, as you may see, blades like those have
been split off. Those flakes of flint, my child, were split off
by men; even your young eyes ought to be able to see that. And
here are other pieces of flint--pear-shaped, but flattened, sharp
at one end and left rounded at the other, which look like spear-
heads, or arrow-heads, or pointed axes, or pointed hatchets--even
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