| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: own violent destruction. It not only consecrates, like the character of
1830, the division of powers, but it extends this feature to an
unbearably contradictory extreme. The "play of constitutional powers,"
as Guizot styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative and the
executive powers, plays permanent "vabanque" in the Constitution of
1848. On the one side, 750 representatives of the people, elected and
qualified for re-election by universal suffrage, who constitute an
uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National
Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, that decides in the last
instance over war, peace and commercial treaties, that alone has the
power to grant amnesties, and that, through its perpetuity, continually
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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: mines. The ore in this case was not considered particularly
good, but from being abundant it was supposed the mine
would sell for about thirty or forty thousand dollars (that is,
6000 or 8000 pounds sterling); yet it had been bought by
one of the English Associations for an ounce of gold (3l.
8s.). The ore is yellow pyrites, which, as I have already
remarked, before the arrival of the English, was not supposed
to contain a particle of copper. On a scale of profits nearly
as great as in the above instance, piles of cinders, abounding
with minute globules of metallic copper, were purchased;
yet with these advantages, the mining associations, as is well
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: of the old ones to compare with it."
These words, spoken in a low voice by her mother one August morning in
1815, had vanquished the young needlewoman's indifference, and she
looked out on the street; but in vain, the stranger was gone.
"Where has he flown to?" said she.
"He will come back no doubt at four; I shall see him coming, and will
touch your foot with mine. I am sure he will come back; he has been
through the street regularly for the last three days; but his hours
vary. The first day he came by at six o'clock, the day before
yesterday it was four, yesterday as early as three. I remember seeing
him occasionally some time ago. He is some clerk in the Prefet's
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