| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: with a chill and, being allowed to have a fire in his room, lay
down a while before dinner. I tried to send him to bed and indeed
thought I had put him in the way of it; but after I had gone to
dress Mrs. Wimbush came up to see him, with the inevitable result
that when I returned I found him under arms and flushed and
feverish, though decorated with the rare flower she had brought him
for his button-hole. He came down to dinner, but Lady Augusta
Minch was very shy of him. To-day he's in great pain, and the
advent of ces dames - I mean of Guy Walsingham and Dora Forbes -
doesn't at all console me. It does Mrs. Wimbush, however, for she
has consented to his remaining in bed so that he may be all right
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Scarecrow of Oz by L. Frank Baum: queer wings they were: shaped like an inverted
chopping-bowl and covered with tough skin instead of
feathers. It had four legs -- much like the legs of a
stork, only double the number -- and its head was
shaped a good deal like that of a poll parrot, with a
beak that curved downward in front and upward at the
edges, and was half bill and half mouth. But to call it
a bird was out of the question, because it had no
feathers whatever except a crest of wavy plumes of a
scarlet color on the very top of its head. The strange
creature must have weighed as much as Cap'n Bill, and
The Scarecrow of Oz |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: imposing personage in Lucien's eyes. Wherefore, while Lucien untied
the string about the Marguerites, he judged it necessary to make some
sort of preface.
"The sonnet, monsieur," said he, "is one of the most difficult forms
of poetry. It has fallen almost entirely into disuse. No Frenchman can
hope to rival Petrarch; for the language in which the Italian wrote,
being so infinitely more pliant than French, lends itself to play of
thought which our positivism (pardon the use of the expression)
rejects. So it seemed to me that a volume of sonnets would be
something quite new. Victor Hugo has appropriated the old, Canalis
writes lighter verse, Beranger has monopolized songs, Casimir
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