| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: food, and lived upon his life, and was as intimate with him as
his own heart, and yet was the foulest of all created things! But
not the less was it the true type of a morbid nature.
Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the
snake and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of him,
even at the expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by
starvation; but, while the wretched man was on the point of
famishing, the monster seemed to feed upon his heart, and to
thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his sweetest and most
congenial diet. Then he privily took a dose of active poison,
imagining that it would not fail to kill either himself or the
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: boa over her fur cloak; in summer, a shawl and a scarf; she is
accomplished in the redundancies of dress.
"You will meet the fair Unknown again at the Italiens, at the Opera,
at a ball. She will then appear under such a different aspect that you
would think them two beings devoid of any analogy. The woman has
emerged from those mysterious garments like a butterfly from its silky
cocoon. She serves up, like some rare dainty, to your lavished eyes,
the forms which her bodice scarcely revealed in the morning. At the
theatre she never mounts higher than the second tier, excepting at the
Italiens. You can there watch at your leisure the studied
deliberateness of her movements. The enchanting deceiver plays off all
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: world of flowers, the gravelled paths, the simulated forest, the
verdant palisades, were contained within the space of five and twenty
square rods, which are worth to-day four hundred thousand francs,--the
value of an actual forest. Here, in this solitude in the middle of
Paris, the birds sang, thrushes, nightingales, warblers, bulfinches,
and sparrows. The greenhouse was like an immense jardiniere, filling
the air with perfume in winter as in summer. The means by which its
atmosphere was made to order, torrid as in China or temperate as in
Italy, were cleverly concealed. Pipes in which hot water circulated,
or steam, were either hidden under ground or festooned with plants
overhead. The boudoir was a large room. The miracle of the modern
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