| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil: And all wild creatures to destruction gave,
Tainted the pools, the fodder charged with bane.
Nor simple was the way of death, but when
Hot thirst through every vein impelled had drawn
Their wretched limbs together, anon o'erflowed
A watery flux, and all their bones piecemeal
Sapped by corruption to itself absorbed.
Oft in mid sacrifice to heaven- the white
Wool-woven fillet half wreathed about his brow-
Some victim, standing by the altar, there
Betwixt the loitering carles a-dying fell:
 Georgics |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: sister, who resisted the wiles of lawyers and did not give a single
answer at the trial without long consideration of what she ought to
say, excited the deepest interest. She became in their minds a figure
to be compared (though in another sense) with Jeannie Deans, whose
piety, grace, modesty and beauty she possessed.
Francois Tascheron continued, therefore, to excite the curiosity of
not only all the town but all the department, and a few romantic women
openly testified their admiration for him.
"If there is really in all this a love for some woman high above him,"
they said, "then he is surely no ordinary man, and you will see that
he will die well."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous
ardour, the better part of the man too often withheld from the
social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with
terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own
experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters
and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one
interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is vain,
interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth
his thoughts and experience in the best light. The egoism of the
Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He
takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the
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