| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: Scotland. His RECREATIONS OF CHRISTOPHER NORTH, albeit their humour
is sometimes too boisterously hammered in, are genial and generous
essays, overflowing with passages of good-fellowship and pedestrian
fancy. I would recommend any person in a dry and melancholy state
of mind to read his paper on "Streams," in the first volume of
ESSAYS CRITICAL AND IMAGINATIVE. But it must be said, by way of
warning to those with whom dryness is a matter of principle, that
all Scotch fishing-books are likely to be sprinkled with Highland
Dew.
Among English anglers, Sir Humphry Davy is one of whom Christopher
North speaks rather slightingly. Nevertheless his SALMONIA is well
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: products of the soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely
laughed at the little man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault
and attending to his business, like a merchant living on his
vineyards, found the answer to the riddle when the ant-lion seized his
prey, after waiting for the day when the extravagance of the Duchesse
de Maufrigneuse culminated in the sale of that splendid property.
Madame Piedefer came to live with her daughter. The combined fortunes
of Monsieur de la Baudraye and his mother-in-law, who had been content
to accept an annuity of twelve hundred francs on the lands of La
Hautoy which she handed over to him, amounted to an acknowledged
income of about fifteen thousand francs.
The Muse of the Department |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: are watered by human hands. Silently the secret of their life
retreats and shrinks away and hides itself.
But in the woods, where falling leaves and crumbling
tree-trunks and wilting ferns have been moulded by Nature into
a deep, brown humus, clean and fragrant--in the woods, where
the sunlight filters green and golden through interlacing
branches, and where pure moisture of distilling rains and
melting snows is held in treasury by never-failing banks of
moss--under the verdurous flood of the forest, like sea-weeds
under the ocean waves, these three little creeping vines put
forth their hands with joy, and spread over rock and hillock and
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