| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: that I was always confident he'd do
something extraordinary."
Mrs. Alexander's shoulders gave a slight
movement, suggestive of impatience.
"Oh, I should think that might have been
a safe prediction. Another cup, please?"
"Yes, thank you. But predicting, in the
case of boys, is not so easy as you might
imagine, Mrs. Alexander. Some get a bad
hurt early and lose their courage; and some
never get a fair wind. Bartley"--he dropped
Alexander's Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: All was silent and palpitating, as a landscape is at midday in summer.
The still foliage lay sharply defined on the blue of the sky; the
insects that live by light, the dragon-flies, the cantharides, were
flying among the reeds and the ash-trees; cattle chewed the cud in the
shade, the ruddy earth of the vineyards glowed, the adders glided up
and down the banks. What a change in the sparkling and coquettish
landscape while I slept! I sprang suddenly from the boat and ran up
the road which went round Clochegourde for I fancied that I saw the
count coming out. I was not mistaken; he was walking beside the hedge,
evidently making for a gate on the road to Azay which followed the
bank of the river.
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: that my pretty red coral came out of a fish, and here it is all
alive!"
"C. tuberculatum," says Mr. Gosse (who described it from specimens
which I sent him in 1854), "is far the finest species. The valves
are more globose and of a warmer colour; those that I have seen are
even more spinous." Such may have been the case in those I sent:
but it has occurred to me now and then to dredge specimens of C.
aculeatum, which had escaped that rolling on the sand fatal in old
age to its delicate spines, and which equalled in colour, size, and
perfectness the noble one figured in poor dear old Dr. Turton's
"British Bivalves." Besides, aculeatum is a far thinner and more
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