| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: There was a puzzled expression upon his wrinkled face,
and a look of hurt sorrow in his eyes.
"David, my boy," he said, "how could you for a moment
doubt my love for you? There is something strange here
that I cannot understand. I know that I am not mad,
and I am equally sure that you are not; but how in the
world are we to account for the strange hallucinations
that each of us seems to harbor relative to the passage
of time since last we saw each other. You are positive
that months have gone by, while to me it seems equally
certain that not more than an hour ago I sat beside you
At the Earth's Core |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs. Perceive,
now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth
orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the
others. What had seemed to be one thing it now appears is
two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made
at the same time to read in fives and to read in fours.
But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find
verses in six groups, because there is not room for six in
the ten syllables; and we do not find verses of two, because
one of the main distinctions of verse from prose resides in
the comparative shortness of the group; but it is even common
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: Artevelde,--that brewer of Ghent who, for a brief hour, was King of
Flanders. This wall-covering, of which there were no less than sixty
panels, contained about fourteen hundred principal figures, and was
held to be Van Huysum's masterpiece. The officer appointed to guard
the burghers whom Charles V. determined to hang when he re-entered his
native town, proposed, it is said, to Van Claes to let him escape if
he would give him Van Huysum's great work; but the weaver had already
despatched it to Douai.
The parlor, whose walls were entirely panelled with this carving,
which Van Huysum, out of regard for the martyr's memory, came to Douai
to frame in wood painted in lapis-lazuli with threads of gold, is
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