| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: run under this bridge to-day; and what shall we do with it?
Nothing. And yet: think only of the mills which that water would
have turned. Think how it might have kept up health and
cleanliness in poor creatures packed away in the back streets of
the nearest town, or even in London itself. Think even how
country folks, in many parts of England, in three months' time,
may be crying out for rain, and afraid of short crops, and fever,
and scarlatina, and cattle-plague, for want of the very water
which we are now letting run back, wasted, into the sea from
whence it came. And yet we call ourselves a civilised people."
It is not wise, I know, to preach to boys. And yet, sometimes, a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were in-
dustrious, but he could never teach them to use
their heads about their work.
Alexandra, her father often said to himself,
was like her grandfather; which was his way of
saying that she was intelligent. John Bergson's
father had been a shipbuilder, a man of consid-
erable force and of some fortune. Late in life he
married a second time, a Stockholm woman of
questionable character, much younger than he,
O Pioneers! |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: of the path brought them directly upon the general;
and in spite of all her virtuous indignation, she found
herself again obliged to walk with him, listen to him,
and even to smile when he smiled. Being no longer able,
however, to receive pleasure from the surrounding objects,
she soon began to walk with lassitude; the general perceived it,
and with a concern for her health, which seemed to reproach
her for her opinion of him, was most urgent for returning
with his daughter to the house. He would follow them
in a quarter of an hour. Again they parted--but Eleanor
was called back in half a minute to receive a strict charge
Northanger Abbey |
