| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Magic of Oz by L. Frank Baum: The Glass Cat, although it had some disagreeable ways and manners,
nevertheless realized that Trot and Cap'n Bill were its friends and so
was quite disturbed at the fix it had gotten them into by leading them
to the Isle of the Magic Flower. The ruby heart of the Glass Cat was
cold and hard, but still it was a heart, and to have a heart of any
sort is to have some consideration for others. But the queer
transparent creature didn't want Trot and Cap'n Bill to know it was
sorry for them, and therefore it moved very slowly until it had
crossed the river and was out of sight among the trees of the forest.
Then it headed straight toward the Emerald City, and trotted so fast
that it was like a crystal streak crossing the valleys and plains.
The Magic of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: its gold upon the mountain-tops, and though the valleys were
still in shadow, they smiled cheerfully in the promise of the
bright day that was hastening onward. The village, completely
shut in by hills, which swelled away gently about it, looked as
if it had rested peacefully in the hollow of the great hand of
Providence. Every dwelling was distinctly visible; the little
spires of the two churches pointed upwards, and caught a
fore-glimmering of brightness from the sun-gilt skies upon their
gilded weather-cocks. The tavern was astir, and the figure of the
old, smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth, was seen beneath
the stoop. Old Graylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: -that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them,
naturally, no more than it had. It had made them anciently meet--
her at twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they
seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't
done a little more for them. They looked at each other as with the
feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much
better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land,
hadn't been so stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all
counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in
coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of
freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too
|
