| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of
the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor.
I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did
detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the
finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of a distant hive in
May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no
idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their
industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably
out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall
them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious
Walking |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: phenomenon than of a corporal habit.
Minna's imagination seconded this illusion, under the dominion of
which all persons would assuredly have fallen,--an illusion which gave
to Seraphitus the appearance of a vision dreamed of in happy sleep. No
known type conveys an image of that form so majestically made to
Minna, but which to the eyes of a man would have eclipsed in womanly
grace the fairest of Raphael's creations. That painter of heaven has
ever put a tranquil joy, a loving sweetness, into the lines of his
angelic conceptions; but what soul, unless it contemplated Seraphitus
himself, could have conceived the ineffable emotions imprinted on his
face? Who would have divined, even in the dreams of artists, where all
Seraphita |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lin McLean by Owen Wister: break a colt," he shouted, looking around with the irrelevant fierceness
of drink--and then his challenge ebbed vacantly in laughter as the
subject blurred in his mind. "You're not drinking, Lin," said he.
"No," said McLean, "I'm not."
"Sworn off again? Well, water never did agree with me."
"Yu' never gave water the chance," retorted the cow-puncher, and we left
the place without my having drunk his health.
It was a grim beginning, this brag attempt to laugh his reputation down,
with the jail door scarce closed behind him. "Folks are not going to like
that," said Lin, as we walked across the bridge again to the hotel. Yet
the sister, left alone here after an hour at most of her brother's
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