| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: grossness of content that somehow offended me. I took the candle
from his hand (for I feared he would set the bed on fire) and
walked back to the supper-table, where, perceiving a measure of
wine, I poured out a cup and called to him to come and drink of it.
He started to his feet at once and ran to me with a strong
expression of hope; but when he saw the wine, he visibly shuddered.
'Oh, no,' he said, 'not that; that is for you. I hate it.'
'Very well, Senor,' said I; 'then I will drink to your good health,
and to the prosperity of your house and family. Speaking of
which,' I added, after I had drunk, 'shall I not have the pleasure
of laying my salutations in person at the feet of the Senora, your
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: which caricaturists so gladly pick up. The haughty young lady suddenly
found a flower in this wide field--the metaphor is reasonable--whose
splendor and coloring worked on her imagination with all the
fascination of novelty. It often happens that we look at a dress, a
hanging, a blank sheet of paper, with so little heed that we do not at
first detect a stain or a bright spot which afterwards strikes the eye
as though it had come there at the very instant when we see it; and by
a sort of moral phenomenon somewhat resembling this, Mademoiselle de
Fontaine discovered in a young man the external perfection of which
she had so long dreamed.
Seated on one of the clumsy chairs which marked the boundary line of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: Till we had freighted well our argosy.
Of which despoiled treasures these remain,
Sordello's passion, and the honeyed line
Of young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine
Driving his pampered jades, and more than these,
The seven-fold vision of the Florentine,
And grave-browed Milton's solemn harmonies.
Poem: Santa Decca
The Gods are dead: no longer do we bring
To grey-eyed Pallas crowns of olive-leaves!
Demeter's child no more hath tithe of sheaves,
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