| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: many points of difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps
only a general resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years,
in a climate so unlike that which had fostered the ancestral
Englishman, must inevitably have wrought important changes in
the physical system of his descendant. The Judge's volume of
muscle could hardly be the same as the Colonel's; there was
undoubtedly less beef in him. Though looked upon as a weighty
man among his contemporaries in respect of animal substance,
and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental development,
well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that the
modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his
House of Seven Gables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Treasure Island |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character,
thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be
remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and
hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once accomplished,
equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own
right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other
purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely
philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble
in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or
to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to
seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with
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