| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: the invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world
besides, into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its
flood of affection.
"You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah!" said he, first
kindly offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove
preparatory to departure. "Very great wrong! But I forgive it,
and will study to make you think better of me. Of course, our
poor Clifford being in so unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think
of urging an interview at present. But I shall watch over his
welfare as if he were my own beloved brother; nor do I at all
despair, my dear cousin, of constraining both him and you to
House of Seven Gables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: translation of a language, especially of a dead language, is
totally impossible. What do we do in reality when we substitute
a French for a Latin, Greek, or Sanscrit expression, or even when
we endeavour to understand a book written in our own tongue two
or three centuries back? We merely put the images and ideas with
which modern life has endowed our intelligence in the place of
absolutely distinct notions and images which ancient life had
brought into being in the mind of races submitted to conditions
of existence having no analogy with our own. When the men of the
Revolution imagined they were copying the Greeks and Romans, what
were they doing except giving to ancient words a sense the latter
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: other minister would have been a great help to her,--one that
preached self-forgetfulness and doin' for others to cure our own
ills; but Parson Dimmick was a vague person, well meanin', but very
numb in his feelin's. I don't suppose at that troubled time Joanna
could think of any way to mend her troubles except to run off and
hide."
"Mother used to say she didn't see how Joanna lived without
having nobody to do for, getting her own meals and tending her own
poor self day in an' day out," said Mrs. Todd sorrowfully.
"There was the hens," repeated Mrs. Fosdick kindly. "I expect
she soon came to makin' folks o' them. No, I never went to work to
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