| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: Close by the meet'n-house on the hill.
- First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill, -
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n-house clock, -
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
- What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: in fact quite gay (ha-ha!) by the sense of immitigable fate. Lady
Augusta promises me to trace the precious object and let me have it
through the post by the time Paraday's well enough to play his part
with it. The last evidence is that her maid did give it to his
lordship's valet. One would suppose it some thrilling number of
THE FAMILY BUDGET. Mrs. Wimbush, who's aware of the accident, is
much less agitated by it than she would doubtless be were she not
for the hour inevitably engrossed with Guy Walsingham."
Later in the day I informed my correspondent, for whom indeed I
kept a loose diary of the situation, that I had made the
acquaintance of this celebrity and that she was a pretty little
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room
and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly
important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain; for the decision
of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed
the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory of reanimation
they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast
whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft
voice gave no hint of the supernormal -- almost diabolical --
power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then
-- and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And
now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has vanished.
Herbert West: Reanimator |
