| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll: He served out some grog with a liberal hand,
And bade them sit down on the beach:
And they could not but own that their Captain looked grand,
As he stood and delivered his speech.
"Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears!"
(They were all of them fond of quotations:
So they drank to his health, and they gave him three cheers,
While he served out additional rations).
"We have sailed many months, we have sailed many weeks,
(Four weeks to the month you may mark),
But never as yet ('tis your Captain who speaks)
The Hunting of the Snark |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . .
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . .
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . .
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: lastly, instead of growing young again, the Faubourg
Saint-Germain grew positively older.
Etiquette, not an institution of primary necessity, might have
been maintained if it had appeared only on state occasions, but
as it was, there was a daily wrangle over precedence; it ceased
to be a matter of art or court ceremonial, it became a question
of power. And if from the outset the Crown lacked an adviser
equal to so great a crisis, the aristocracy was still more
lacking in a sense of its wider interests, an instinct which
might have supplied the deficiency. They stood nice about M. de
Talleyrand's marriage, when M. de Talleyrand was the one man
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