| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating
warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and
exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a
finished composition. We passed a cow stretched by the
roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her
ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a
dozen flies, a monument of content.
A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain
road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another,
green, tangled, full of noble timber, giving us every now and
again a sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: And now was the hour of the bath in Taiarapu: far and near
The lovely laughter of bathers rose and delighted his ear.
Night massed in the valleys; the sun on the mountain coast
Struck, end-long; and above the clouds embattled their host,
And glowed and gloomed on the heights; and the heads of the palms were gems,
And far to the rising eve extended the shade of their stems;
And the shadow of Tamatea hovered already at home.
And sudden the sound of one coming and running light as the foam
Struck on his ear; and he turned, and lo! a man on his track,
Girded and armed with an omare, following hard at his back.
At a bound the man was upon him; - and, or ever a word was said,
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: with fears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of my
own Alan Breck. Presently, however, it began to occur to me
it would be like my Master to curry favour with the Prince's
Irishmen; and that an Irish refugee would have a particular
reason to find himself in India with his countryman, the
unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I decided he should be,
and then, all of a sudden, I was aware of a tall shadow
across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon. No man (in Lord
Foppington's phrase) of a nice morality could go very deep
with my Master: in the original idea of this story conceived
in Scotland, this companion had been besides intended to be
|
