| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: lattice-work and the hideous garlands due to the uninventive designers
of the time. Still, if harmony at least had prevailed, if the
furniture of modern mahogany had but assumed the twisted forms of
which Boucher's corrupt taste first set the fashion, Angelique's room
would only have suggested the fantastic contrast of a young couple in
the nineteenth century living as though they were in the eighteenth;
but a number of details were in ridiculous discord. The consoles, the
clocks, the candelabra, were decorated with the military trophies
which the wars of the Empire commended to the affections of the
Parisians; and the Greek helmets, the Roman crossed daggers, and the
shields so dear to military enthusiasm that they were introduced on
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: stair, and stepped out before the house. Within, Rorie and the
black were asleep together in the kitchen; outside was a wonderful
clear night of stars, with here and there a cloud still hanging,
last stragglers of the tempest. It was near the top of the flood,
and the Merry Men were roaring in the windless quiet of the night.
Never, not even in the height of the tempest, had I heard their
song with greater awe. Now, when the winds were gathered home,
when the deep was dandling itself back into its summer slumber, and
when the stars rained their gentle light over land and sea, the
voice of these tide-breakers was still raised for havoc. They
seemed, indeed, to be a part of the world's evil and the tragic
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Legend of Montrose by Walter Scott: beneath the elms in the churchyard; "for death," he said, "had
been his next-door neighbour for so many years, that he had no
apology for dropping the acquaintance." His evening promenade
was on the bleaching-green by the river-side, where he was
sometimes to be seen on an open bench, with spectacles on nose,
conning over the newspapers to a circle of village politicians,
explaining military terms, and aiding the comprehension of his
hearers by lines drawn on the ground with the end of his rattan.
On other occasions, he was surrounded by a bevy of school-boys,
whom he sometimes drilled to the manual, and sometimes, with less
approbation on the part of their parents, instructed in the
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