| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: vintage house, which belongs to a substantial burgess of Tours, has
charms for every imagination, for the humblest and dullest as well as
for the most impassioned and lofty. No one can dwell there without
feeling that happiness is in the air, without a glimpse of all that is
meant by a peaceful life without care or ambition. There is that in
the air and the sound of the river that sets you dreaming; the sands
have a language, and are joyous or dreary, golden or wan; and the
owner of the vineyard may sit motionless amid perennial flowers and
tempting fruit, and feel all the stir of the world about him.
If an Englishman takes the house for the summer, he is asked a
thousand francs for six months, the produce of the vineyard not
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: He makes excuses for his being there.
No cloudy show of stormy blustering weather
Doth yet in his fair welkin once appear;
Till sable Night, mother of Dread and Fear,
Upon the world dim darkness doth display,
And in her vaulty prison stows the day.
For then is Tarquin brought unto his bed,
Intending weariness with heavy spright;
For, after supper, long he questioned
With modest Lucrece, and wore out the night:
Now leaden slumber with life's strength doth fight;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: quickness? I should say the quality which accomplishes much in a little
time--whether in running, speaking, or in any other sort of action.
LACHES: You would be quite correct.
SOCRATES: And now, Laches, do you try and tell me in like manner, What is
that common quality which is called courage, and which includes all the
various uses of the term when applied both to pleasure and pain, and in all
the cases to which I was just now referring?
LACHES: I should say that courage is a sort of endurance of the soul, if I
am to speak of the universal nature which pervades them all.
SOCRATES: But that is what we must do if we are to answer the question.
And yet I cannot say that every kind of endurance is, in my opinion, to be
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