| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lady Susan by Jane Austen: can hardly suppose that Lady Susan's plans extend to marriage. I wish you
could get Reginald home again on any plausible pretence; he is not at all
disposed to leave us, and I have given him as many hints of my father's
precarious state of health as common decency will allow me to do in my own
house. Her power over him must now be boundless, as she has entirely
effaced all his former ill-opinion, and persuaded him not merely to forget
but to justify her conduct. Mr. Smith's account of her proceedings at
Langford, where he accused her of having made Mr. Mainwaring and a young
man engaged to Miss Mainwaring distractedly in love with her, which
Reginald firmly believed when he came here, is now, he is persuaded, only a
scandalous invention. He has told me so with a warmth of manner which spoke
Lady Susan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: complete dumb idiot. The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I
cannot hate, whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some
grains of affection in his feeble mind, shown in the continued
interest he takes in his wretched sister, and also in a dog-like
attachment he once bore me), will probably be in the same state one
day. My father and my brother Rowland knew all this; but they
thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the plot
against me."
"These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of
concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my
wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes
Jane Eyre |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: ivory--drawings of elk, and bull, and horse, and ibex--and one,
which was found in France, of the great mammoth himself, the
woolly elephant, with a mane on his shoulders like a lion's mane.
So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange
creature, called man, was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows
love to draw, and copy what you see, you know not why. Remember
that. You like to draw; but why you like it neither you nor any
man can tell. It is one of the mysteries of human nature; and
that poor savage clothed in skins, dirty it may be, and more
ignorant than you (happily) can conceive, when he sat scratching
on ivory in the cave the figures of the animals he hunted, was
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