| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Professor by Charlotte Bronte: involuntary laugh, moved thereto by a slight inward revelation of
the inconsistency of man. It was as I thought: Hunsden had
expected me to take with calm his incorrect and offensive
surmises, his bitter and haughty taunts; and himself was chafed
by a laugh, scarce louder than a whisper.
His brow darkened, his thin nostril dilated a little.
"Yes," he began, "I told you that you were an aristocrat, and who
but an aristocrat would laugh such a laugh as that, and look such
a look? A laugh frigidly jeering; a look lazily mutinous;
gentlemanlike irony, patrician resentment. What a nobleman you
would have made, William Crimsworth! You are cut out for one;
The Professor |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: her political position, were such that the philosophes must needs
have been her enemies. But he mentions another fact which seems to
me to belong neither to the category of religion nor to that of
politics; a fact which, if he had done us the honour to enlarge upon
it, might have led him and his readers to a more true understanding
of the disrepute into which Christianity had fallen in France.
"The ecclesiastical authority had been specially employed in keeping
watch over the progress of thought; and the censorship of books was
a daily annoyance to the philosophes. By defending the common
liberties of the human mind against the Church, they were combating
in their own cause: and they began by breaking the shackles which
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: trusted with a secret, and keep it so well and so closely that even
your mother herself shall not know that you have a secret to keep?
There is no one else in this house whom I can trust to-day. You will
not betray my trust, will you?'
" 'No, father.'
" 'Very well, then, Ernest, in a minute or two I will give you a
sealed packet that belongs to M. Derville; you must take such care of
it that no one can know that you have it; then you must slip out of
the house and put the letter into the post-box at the corner.'
" 'Yes, father.'
" 'Can I depend upon you?'
Gobseck |
