| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: then studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the
elements contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to
man who absorbs them, deriving from them a particular expression
of life? Did he work it all out by the power of deduction and
analogy, to which we owe the genius of Cuvier? Be this as it may,
this man was in all the secrets of the human frame; he knew it in
the past and in the future, emphasizing the present.
But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates
did and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards
new worlds? No. Though it is impossible to deny that this
persistent observer of human chemistry possessed that antique
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: strange gentleman, who hailed him with a ready familiarity,
proceeded at once to discuss with him the trade of droving and the
prices of cattle, and did not disdain to take a pinch from the
inevitable ram's horn. Presently I was aware that the stranger's
eye was directed on myself; and there ensued a conversation, some
of which I could not help overhearing at the time, and the rest
have pieced together more or less plausibly from the report of Sim.
'Surely that must be an AMATEUR DROVER ye have gotten there?' the
gentleman seems to have asked.
Sim replied, I was a young gentleman that had a reason of his own
to travel privately.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An International Episode by Henry James: She was more in the Boston style; she had lived a great deal
in Boston, and she was very highly educated. Boston girls,
it was propounded, were more like English young ladies.
Lord Lambeth had presently a chance to test the truth of this proposition,
for on the company rising in compliance with a suggestion from their
hostess that they should walk down to the rocks and look at the sea,
the young Englishman again found himself, as they strolled across the grass,
in proximity to Mrs. Westgate's sister. Though she was but a girl of twenty,
she appeared to feel the obligation to exert an active hospitality; and this
was, perhaps, the more to be noticed as she seemed by nature a reserved
and retiring person, and had little of her sister's fraternizing quality.
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