| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within
this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet
unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the
tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now
first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my
thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that
the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a
scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them.
Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead--for we could
not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: senators. Yet the idea lingered that because he had never before
held high office, and because a large part of his life had been
passed in the rude surroundings of the frontier, he must of
necessity be lacking in power to govern--be weaker in will,
without tact or culture--must in every way be less fitted to cope
with the difficult problems so rapidly coming upon the
administration.
At the beginning even Secretary Seward shared this view. Mr.
Lincoln must have been surprised indeed, when, on the first day
of April, exactly four weeks after his inauguration, his
Secretary of State, the man he justly looked upon as the chief
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: take on so. It give me the cold shivers to see him,
and so it did Jim. By and by he got to yelling and
screaming, and then he swore the world shouldn't ever
have his secret at all now, it had treated him so mean.
He said he would sail his balloon around the globe just
to show what he could do, and then he would sink it in
the sea, and sink us all along with it, too. Well, it was
the awfulest fix to be in, and here was night coming
on!
He give us something to eat, and made us go to the
other end of the boat, and he laid down on a locker,
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