| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: little with the particular accident which woke up the sleeping
disease. The disease was there, and if one thing had not awakened
it some other would. And so, if the population of a great city
have got into a socially diseased state, it matters little what
shock may have caused it to explode. Politics may in one case,
fanaticism in another, national hatred in a third, hunger in a
fourth--perhaps even, as in Byzantium of old, no more important
matter than the jealousy between the blue and the green
charioteers in the theatre, may inflame a whole population to
madness and civil war. Our business is not with the nature of the
igniting spark, but of the powder which is ignited.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: 'Well, Miss Matilda is quite as good - better in one respect.'
'What is that?'
'She's honest.'
'And the other is not?'
'I should not call her DIShonest; but it must be confessed she's a
little artful.'
'ARTFUL is she? - I saw she was giddy and vain - and now,' he
added, after a pause, 'I can well believe she was artful too; but
so excessively so as to assume an aspect of extreme simplicity and
unguarded openness. Yes,' continued he, musingly, 'that accounts
for some little things that puzzled me a trifle before.'
Agnes Grey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: declined to receive the deputies, but sent an intimation by
Chancellor Seguier, implying that if the parliament did not
humble itself before her majesty by negativing all the
questions that had been the cause of the quarrel, Paris
would be besieged the very next day.
This threatening answer, unluckily for the court, produced
quite a different effect to that which was intended. It
wounded the pride of the parliament, which, supported by the
citizens, replied by declaring that Cardinal Mazarin was the
cause of all the discontent; denounced him as the enemy both
of the king and the state, and ordered him to retire from
Twenty Years After |
