| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: On wings they are carried -
After the singer is dead
And the maker buried.
Low as the singer lies
In the field of heather,
Songs of his fashion bring
The swains together.
And when the west is red
With the sunset embers,
The lover lingers and sings
And the maid remembers.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: partially to them in pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.
How does it become a man to behave toward the American
government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace
be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize
that political organization as my government which is the
slave's government also.
All men recognize the right of revolution; that is,
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist,
the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are
great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not
the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the
 On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: solitude. If they would but leave him alone with his own
thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond
the power of melancholy to affect him. But now, when his
animal strength has so much declined that he sings the
discomforts of winter instead of the inspirations of spring,
and he has no longer any appetite for life, he confesses he
is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from grievous
thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing,
talking, and singing. (1)
(1) Works, ii. 57, 258.
While Charles was thus falling into years, the order of
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