| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: speedily followed his example. All snored and groaned as they lay in
different corners. The watchman went to sleep the first of all, he had
drunk so much in honour of the young masters' home-coming.
The mother alone did not sleep. She bent over the pillow of her
beloved sons, as they lay side by side; she smoothed with a comb their
carelessly tangled locks, and moistened them with her tears. She gazed
at them with her whole soul, with every sense; she was wholly merged
in the gaze, and yet she could not gaze enough. She had fed them at
her own breast, she had tended them and brought them up; and now to
see them only for an instant! "My sons, my darling sons! what will
become of you! what fate awaits you?" she said, and tears stood in the
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: It was Miss Lombard's turn to look perplexedly at Wyant. His
last words and her father's unexpected reply had evidently
carried her beyond her depth.
"Well, sir, am I to take the picture?" Wyant smilingly pursued.
"No, young man; nor a photograph of it. Nor a sketch, either;
mind that,--nothing that can be reproduced. Sybilla," he cried
with sudden passion, "swear to me that the picture shall never be
reproduced! No photograph, no sketch--now or afterward. Do you
hear me?"
"Yes, father," said the girl quietly.
"The vandals," he muttered, "the desecrators of beauty; if I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: great cities--a dangerous class. How it arose is not yet clear.
That the Reformation had something to do with the matter, we can
hardly doubt. At the dissolution of the monasteries, the more
idle, ignorant, and profligate members of the mendicant orders,
unable to live any longer on the alms of the public, sunk,
probably, into vicious penury. The frightful misgovernment of
this country during the minority of Edward the Sixth, especially
the conversion of tilled lands into pasture, had probably the
effect of driving the surplus agricultural population into the
great towns. But the social history of this whole period is as
yet obscure, and I have no right to give an opinion on it.
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