| 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: of death; my strength and armor shall prevail. My Ambulinia shall
rest in this hall until the break of another day, and if we fall,
we fall together. If we die, we die clinging to our tattered rights,
and our blood alone shall tell the mournful tale of a murdered
daughter and a ruined father." Sure enough, he kept watch all night,
and was successful in defending his house and family. The bright
morning gleamed upon the hills, night vanished away, the Major
and his associates felt somewhat ashamed that they had not been as
fortunate as they expected to have been; however, they still leaned
upon their arms in dispersed groups; some were walking the streets,
others were talking in the Major's behalf. Many of the citizen
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche
of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than
the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms.
This syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the
words of a phrase, means: "Take care, we can no longer talk freely."
There was besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty
which was lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue,
a slang expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife,
and my wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the
great century when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.
Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner
Les Miserables |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: grant no harm has happened!"
"You have some one in the next room, have you not?" said Montefiore,
giving no sign of emotion.
The draper dropped a word of imprecation against the girls. Evidently
alarmed, the wife opened a secret door, and led in, half fainting, the
Italian's madonna, to whom he was careful to pay no attention; only,
to avoid a too-studied indifference, he glanced at the girl before he
turned to his host and said in his own language:--
"Is that your daughter, signore?"
Perez de Lagounia (such was the merchant's name) had large commercial
relations with Genoa, Florence, and Livorno; he knew Italian, and
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