| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: their romantic tints on trees and seats and roofs and stones. The
crumbling window-casings were hollowed by rain, defaced by time; the
balconies were broken, the terraces demolished. Some of the outside
shutters hung from a single hinge. The rotten doors seemed quite
unable to resist an assailant. Covered with shining tufts of
mistletoe, the branches of the neglected fruit-trees gave no sign of
fruit. Grass grew in the paths. Such ruin and desolation cast a weird
poesy on the scene, filling the souls of the spectators with dreamy
thoughts. A poet would have stood there long, plunged in a melancholy
reverie, admiring this disorder so full of harmony, this destruction
which was not without its grace. Suddenly, the brown tiles shone, the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: fly-book!"
He managed to get her to the depot over half an hour ahead of
time. The train had not even backed in, nor the ticket office
opened.
"I told you, Condy, I told you," complained Blix, sinking
helplessly upon a bench in the waiting-room.
"No--no--no," he answered vaguely, looking nervously about, his
head in the air. "We're none too soon--have more time to rest
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: study and more comparison of them with one another, and with forged
writings in general, than they have yet received, before we can finally
decide on their character. We do not consider them all as genuine until
they can be proved to be spurious, as is often maintained and still more
often implied in this and similar discussions; but should say of some of
them, that their genuineness is neither proven nor disproven until further
evidence about them can be adduced. And we are as confident that the
Epistles are spurious, as that the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Laws are
genuine.
On the whole, not a twentieth part of the writings which pass under the
name of Plato, if we exclude the works rejected by the ancients themselves
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