| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: No, we will not hurt the village, for Messua was kind to me."
When the moon rose over the plain, making it look all milky,
the horrified villagers saw Mowgli, with two wolves at his heels
and a bundle on his head, trotting across at the steady wolf's
trot that eats up the long miles like fire. Then they banged the
temple bells and blew the conches louder than ever. And Messua
cried, and Buldeo embroidered the story of his adventures in the
jungle, till he ended by saying that Akela stood up on his hind
legs and talked like a man.
The moon was just going down when Mowgli and the two wolves
came to the hill of the Council Rock, and they stopped at Mother
The Jungle Book |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: refuse the name of heroes to these men? And yet they, probably,
would have utterly declined the honour. They had but done that
which was in the bond. They were but obeying orders after all.
As Miss Yonge well says of all heroic persons: "'I have but done
that which it was my duty to do,' is the natural answer of those
capable of such actions. They have been constrained to them by
duty or pity; have never deemed it possible to act otherwise; and
did not once think of themselves in the matter at all."
These last true words bring us to another element in heroism: its
simplicity. Whatsoever is not simple; whatsoever is affected,
boastful, wilful, covetous, tarnishes, even destroys, the heroic
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: of that reign, should it ever be revived. At the present moment she is
strictly virtuous from policy, possibly from inclination. Married for
the last seven years to the Marquis de Listomere, one of those
deputies who expect a peerage, she may also consider that such conduct
will promote the ambitions of her family. Some women are reserving
their opinion of her until the moment when Monsieur de Listomere
becomes a peer of France, when she herself will be thirty-six years of
age,--a period of life when most women discover that they are the
dupes of social laws.
The marquis is a rather insignificant man. He stands well at court;
his good qualities are as negative as his defects; the former can no
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