| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: from her splendid mansion, which no amount of fortune had enabled her
to keep, and which the hammer of speculators has since demolished. The
woman who thought she was scarcely well served by thirty servants, who
possessed the most beautiful reception-rooms in all Paris, and the
loveliest little private apartments, and who made them the scene of
such delightful fetes, now lived in a small apartment of five rooms,--
an antechamber, dining-room, salon, one bed-chamber, and a dressing-
room, with two women-servants only.
"Ah! she is devoted to her son," said that clever creature, Madame
d'Espard, "and devoted without ostentation; she is happy. Who would
ever have believed so frivolous a woman was capable of such persistent
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: that the extreme liberalism of these countries must ultimately
lead to good results. The very general toleration of
foreign religions, the regard paid to the means of education,
the freedom of the press, the facilities offered to all
foreigners, and especially, as I am bound to add, to every one
professing the humblest pretensions to science, should be
recollected with gratitude by those who have visited Spanish
South America.
December 6th. -- The Beagle sailed from the Rio Plata,
never again to enter its muddy stream. Our course was
directed to Port Desire, on the coast of Patagonia. Before
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: opposite slope of Maybury Hill towards Old Woking.
In front was a quiet sunny landscape, a wheat field ahead
on either side of the road, and the Maybury Inn with its
swinging sign. I saw the doctor's cart ahead of me. At the
bottom of the hill I turned my head to look at the hillside I
was leaving. Thick streamers of black smoke shot with threads
of red fire were driving up into the still air, and throwing
dark shadows upon the green treetops eastward. The smoke
already extended far away to the east and west--to the By-
fleet pine woods eastward, and to Woking on the west. The
road was dotted with people running towards us. And very
War of the Worlds |
