| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs: dral caused the bishop to look up in ill-concealed annoy-
ance. At the sight that met his eyes his hands halted in
mid-air.
The great audience turned as one toward the doors at
the end of the long central aisle. There, through the wide-
swung portals, they saw mounted men forcing their way into
the cathedral. The great horses shouldered aside the foot-
soldiers that attempted to bar their way, and twenty troop-
ers of the Royal Horse thundered to the very foot of the
chancel steps.
At their head rode Lieutenant Butzow and a tall young
The Mad King |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: You gave me bread and wine,
And sent me under sun and stars,
For all the world was mine.
Oh, take the sandals off my feet,
You know not what you do;
For all my world is in your arms,
My sun and stars are you.
April Song
Willow, in your April gown
Delicate and gleaming,
Do you mind in years gone by
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: to the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing,
fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling
leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies. All we can do
with books of human experience is to make them alive again with
something borrowed from our own lives. We can make a book alive
for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form
to our own experience. Now an author's first novel is naturally
drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is,
is a literal copy of nature under various slight disguises. But
the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must have the
creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
