| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: soon after tea to fulfill her evening engagements;
and Elinor was obliged to assist in making a whist table
for the others. Marianne was of no use on these occasions,
as she would never learn the game; but though her time
was therefore at her own disposal, the evening was by no
means more productive of pleasure to her than to Elinor,
for it was spent in all the anxiety of expectation and the
pain of disappointment. She sometimes endeavoured for a
few minutes to read; but the book was soon thrown aside,
and she returned to the more interesting employment
of walking backwards and forwards across the room,
Sense and Sensibility |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: of horses and cattle; but she will have a monopoly of milk in Paris,
for her climate, happily, forbids grape culture. We shall soon see a
curious phenomenon in the progressive rise in the cost of meat. In
twenty years from now, in 1850, Paris, which paid seven to eleven sous
for a pound of beef in 1814, will be paying twenty--unless there comes
a man of genius who can carry out the plan of Charles X."
"You have laid your finger on the mortal wound of France," said the
/juge de paix/. "The root of our evils lies in the section relating to
inheritance in the Civil Code, in which the equal division of property
among heirs is ordained. That's the pestle that pounds territory into
crumbs, individualizes fortunes, and takes from them their needful
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: Lo, now, when to your task in the great house
At morning through the portico you pass,
One moment glance, where by the pillared wall
Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,
Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument
Of faiths forgot and races undivined:
Sit now disconsolate, remembering well
The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,
The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice,
Incessant, of the breakers on the shore.
As far as these from their ancestral shrine,
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