| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Chouans by Honore de Balzac: flanks. The dead silence which reigned among the recruits, surprised
at the manoeuvring of the old republican, and their lagging march up
the mountain excited to the very utmost the distrust and watchfulness
of the chief--whose name was Hulot. All the striking points in the
foregoing description had been to him matters of the keenest interest;
he marched in silence, surrounded by five young officers, each of whom
respected the evident preoccupation of their leader. But just as Hulot
reached the summit of La Pelerine he turned his head, as if by
instinct, to inspect the anxious faces of the recruits, and suddenly
broke silence. The slow advance of the Bretons had put a distance of
three or four hundred feet between themselves and their escort.
The Chouans |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us --
Nothing now to comfort us, but love's road home: --
Over there beyond the darkness there's a window gleams to greet us,
And a warm hearth waits for us within.
Come away! come away! -- or the roving-fiend will hold us,
And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:
There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,
There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.
So we'll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better
For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: --
The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: tongue would have rasped through the skin of my leg--which was luckily
pretty tough--and have drawn the blood, and then there would be no
chance for me. So I just lay there and thought of my sins, and prayed
to the Almighty, and reflected that after all life was a very enjoyable
thing.
"Then of a sudden I heard a crashing of bushes and the shouting and
whistling of men, and there were the two boys coming back with the
cattle, which they had found trekking along all together. The lions
lifted their heads and listened, then bounded off without a sound--and I
fainted.
"The lions came back no more that night, and by the next morning my
Long Odds |
