| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: (For thus it pleased the King to range me close
After Sir Galahad); "nay," said he, "but men
With strength and will to right the wronged, of power
To lay the sudden heads of violence flat,
Knights that in twelve great battles splashed and dyed
The strong White Horse in his own heathen blood--
But one hath seen, and all the blind will see.
Go, since your vows are sacred, being made:
Yet--for ye know the cries of all my realm
Pass through this hall--how often, O my knights,
Your places being vacant at my side,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: request that it may not be interrupted by any reflections."
"Reflection is so antipathetic to it!" cried Joseph Bridau.
"I was seventeen," de Marsay went on; "the Restoration was being
consolidated; my old friends know how impetuous and fervid I was then.
I was in love for the first time, and I was--I may say so now--one of
the handsomest young fellows in Paris. I had youth and good looks, two
advantages due to good fortune, but of which we are all as proud as of
a conquest. I must be silent as to the rest.--Like all youths, I was
in love with a woman six years older than myself. No one of you here,"
said he, looking carefully round the table, "can suspect her name or
recognize her. Ronquerolles alone, at the time, ever guessed my
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: or at least not enough to resist the strong inclination I had to go
abroad again, which hung about me like a chronic distemper. In
particular, the desire of seeing my new plantation in the island,
and the colony I left there, ran in my head continually. I dreamed
of it all night, and my imagination ran upon it all day: it was
uppermost in all my thoughts, and my fancy worked so steadily and
strongly upon it that I talked of it in my sleep; in short, nothing
could remove it out of my mind: it even broke so violently into
all my discourses that it made my conversation tiresome, for I
could talk of nothing else; all my discourse ran into it, even to
impertinence; and I saw it myself.
Robinson Crusoe |
