| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses."
The favourites of James I wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane.
Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armour studded
with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a
skull-cap parseme with pearls. Henry II wore jewelled gloves reaching
to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-two
great orients. The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke
of Burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls and studded
with sapphires.
How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration!
Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: wife, and saw that girl there for the first time.
Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose,
made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I
don't know what induced me to notice her at all.
There are faces that call your attention by a cu-
rious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as,
walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague
shape which, after all, may be nothing more cu-
rious or strange than a signpost. The only pecu-
liarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in
her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which
Amy Foster |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Of life just then is lifted a little
To give to their sight new joys -- new sorrows --
Or nothing at all, sometimes. I was watching
The slow, sweet scenes of a golden picture,
Flushed and alive with a long delusion
That made the murmur of home, when I shuddered
And felt like a knife that awful silence
That comes when the music goes -- forever.
The truth came over my life like a darkness
Over a forest where one man wanders,
Worse than alone. For a time I staggered
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