| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: Most of the streets are flights of steps. The high-road has barely
room to edge itself through among the old houses, between the
window-gardens of bright flowers. On the hottest July day the
afternoon is cool and shady. The gay, little skiffs and long, open
gondolas are flitting continually along the lake, which is the main
street of Hallstatt.
The incongruous, but comfortable, modern hotel has a huge glass
veranda, where you can eat your dinner and observe human nature in
its transparent holiday disguises. I was much pleased and
entertained by a family, or confederacy, of people attired as
peasants--the men with feathered hats, green stockings, and bare
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: breakfast-time. I have not taken the trouble to date them, as
Raspail, PERE, used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but
they were scattered over several breakfasts; and I have said a good
many more things since, which I shall very possibly print some time
or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious friends.
I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the Professor,
of whom you may perhaps hear more by and by. The Professor read
them, he told me, at a farewell meeting, where the youngest of our
great Historians met a few of his many friends at their invitation.
YES, we knew we must lose him, - though friendship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: I shall marry you early. It will comfort me to have you leave home."
"Papa," said Eugenie, "we have decided to take the first man who
offers."
"Ah!" he cried, "that is the bitter fruit of such a system. They want
to make saints, and they make--" he stopped without ending his
sentence.
Often the two girls felt an infinite tenderness in their father's
"Adieu," or in his eyes, when, by chance, he dined at home. They
pitied that father so seldom seen, and love follows often upon pity.
This stern and rigid education was the cause of the marriages of the
two sisters welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina by the
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