| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: not shamelessly, but like Trilby, frightening neither Dougal nor
Jeannie, alarming no one,--being as chaste as our noble French
language requires, and as bold as the pencil of Gerard in his picture
of Daphnis and Chloe.
The bedroom of Madame Jules was a sacred plot. Herself, her husband,
and her maid alone entered it. Opulence has glorious privileges, and
the most enviable are those which enable the development of sentiments
to their fullest extent,--fertilizing them by the accomplishment of
even their caprices, and surrounding them with a brilliancy that
enlarges them, with refinements that purify them, with a thousand
delicacies that make them still more alluring. If you hate dinners on
Ferragus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: himself that the little gold circlet (engraved
inside: Newland to May, April ---, 187-) was in its
place; then, resuming his former attitude, his tall hat
and pearl-grey gloves with black stitchings grasped in
his left hand, he stood looking at the door of the
church.
Overhead, Handel's March swelled pompously through
the imitation stone vaulting, carrying on its waves the
faded drift of the many weddings at which, with cheerful
indifference, he had stood on the same chancel step
watching other brides float up the nave toward other
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: wonder at the strange figures he saw before him; upon which he at once
gave way to the idea which his crazed fancy invariably conjured up
before him, and took it into his head that all these shapes were
phantoms of the enchanted castle, and that he himself was
unquestionably enchanted as he could neither move nor help himself;
precisely what the curate, the concoctor of the scheme, expected would
happen. Of all that were there Sancho was the only one who was at once
in his senses and in his own proper character, and he, though he was
within very little of sharing his master's infirmity, did not fail
to perceive who all these disguised figures were; but he did not
dare to open his lips until he saw what came of this assault and
Don Quixote |
