| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: the attire of the pillow, and confused by sleep suddenly broken,
were protruded to the gaze of whoever had leisure to observe
them. Eager voices hailed each other from house to house, all
demanding the explanation, which not a soul could give.
Half-dressed men hurried towards the unknown commotion stumbling
as they went over the stone steps that thrust themselves into the
narrow foot-walk. The shouts, the laughter, and the tuneless bray
the antipodes of music, came onwards with increasing din, till
scattered individuals, and then denser bodies, began to appear
round a corner at the distance of a hundred yards
"Will you recognize your kinsman, if he passes in this crowd?"
The Snow Image |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: Seventh-Day Baptists.
Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the Alleghany Mountains, I have
found a curious tradition that Ascension Day is the luckiest in the
year for fishing. On that morning the district school is apt to he
thinly attended, and you must be on the stream very early if you do
not wish to find wet footprints on the stones ahead of you.
But in fact, all these superstitions about fortunate days are idle
and presumptuous. If there were such days in the calendar, a kind
and firm Providence would never permit the race of man to discover
them. It would rob life of one of its principal attractions, and
make fishing altogether too easy to be interesting.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: a Christian land. But I beg you to recollect that there are books
and books; and that in these days of a free press it is
impossible, in the long run, to prevent girls reading books of
very different shades of opinion, and very different religious
worth. It may be, therefore, of the very highest importance to a
girl to have her intellect, her taste, her emotions, her moral
sense, in a word, her whole womanhood, so cultivated and regulated
that she shall herself be able to discern the true from the false,
the orthodox from the unorthodox, the truly devout from the merely
sentimental, the Gospel from its counterfeits.
I should have thought that there never had been in Britain, since
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