| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: fire; but he prudently said nothing, as yet.
"He's in dat ar shed," said a little fellow, who stood
holding George's horse.
Legree kicked the boy, and swore at him; but George, without
saying another word, turned and strode to the spot.
Tom had been lying two days since the fatal night, not suffering,
for every nerve of suffering was blunted and destroyed. He lay,
for the most part, in a quiet stupor; for the laws of a powerful
and well-knit frame would not at once release the imprisoned spirit.
By stealth, there had been there, in the darkness of the night,
poor desolated creatures, who stole from their scanty hours'
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread,
and each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four pearls.
He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims for
the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy and was decorated with "thirteen
hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned
with the king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies,
whose wings were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen,
the whole worked in gold." Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed
made for her of black velvet powdered with crescents and suns.
Its curtains were of damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands,
figured upon a gold and silver ground, and fringed along the edges
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: concerning longitudes, and smiled with superiority at Felicite's
bewilderment. At last, he took a pencil and pointed out an
imperceptible black point in the scallops of an oval blotch, adding:
"There it is." She bent over the map; the maze of coloured lines hurt
her eyes without enlightening her; and when Bourais asked her what
puzzled her, she requested him to show her the house Victor lived in.
Bourais threw up his hands, sneezed, and then laughed uproariously;
such ignorance delighted his soul; but Felicite failed to understand
the cause of his mirth, she whose intelligence was so limited that she
perhaps expected to see even the picture of her nephew!
It was two weeks later that Liebard came into the kitchen at market-
A Simple Soul |
