| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: and so made me this present out of a tender heart. For the rest of
the journey I was petted like a sick child; he lent me newspapers,
thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale, and
came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.
THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA
It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday
without a cloud. We were at sea - there is no other adequate
expression - on the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory on
the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to
spy about me, and to spy in vain for something new. It was a world
almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells: stamping about the room and shouting curses.
For a long time he kept himself in a sort of frenzy,
raging at his position, at his own folly, at the knaves
who had imprisoned him. He did this because he
did not want to look calmly at his position. He clung
to his anger--because he was afraid of Fear.
Presently he found himself reasoning with himself
This imprisonment was unaccountable, but no doubt
the legal forms--new legal forms--of the time permitted
it. It must, of course, be legal. These people
were two hundred years further on in the march of
When the Sleeper Wakes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none. The
catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his
impatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children; the virtue
of his one true daughter would have saved him from all the injuries
of the others, unless he had cast her away from him; as it is, she
all but saves him.
Of Othello I need not trace the tale;--nor the one weakness of his
so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to
that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who
dies in wild testimony against his error:-
"Oh, murderous coxcomb! what should such a fool
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