| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: it will be there. And, on the other hand, how many do we
continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only
merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted to mention
Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will. It
is a poor diet for the mind, a very colourless and toothless
'criticism of life'; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most
intricate and dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once
of elegance and of good sense; and the two oranges, even if
one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable grace.
Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for
though in verse also the implication of the logical texture
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: "I did not know that she had it."
The gentleness, or rather the exquisite sweetness of this angel's
voice, might have touched a cannibal, but not an artist in the
clutches of wounded vanity.
"It is worthy of her!" exclaimed the painter in a voice of thunder. "I
will be avenged!" he cried, striding up and down the room. "She shall
die of shame; I will paint her! Yes, I will paint her as Messalina
stealing out at night from the palace of Claudius."
"Theodore!" said a faint voice.
"I will kill her!"
"My dear----"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: We now heard the hurried steps of our guide; he had put on his Sunday
clothes. We addressed a few ordinary words to him; he seemed to think
that our mood had changed, and with that reserve that comes of misery,
he kept silence. Though from time to time we pressed each other's
hands that we might feel the mutual flow of our ideas and impressions,
we walked along for half an hour in silence, either because we were
oppressed by the heat which rose in waves from the burning sands, or
because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. Like
children, we held each other's hands; in fact, we could hardly have
made a dozen steps had we walked arm in arm. The path which led to
Batz was not so much as traced. A gust of wind was enough to efface
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