| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: burning, sunken eyes, under bald heads yellow from the labors of
futile scholasticism, contrasted with young and eager countenances,
grave faces, warlike faces, and the ruddy cheeks of the financial
class.
These lectures, dissertations, theses, sustained by the brightest
geniuses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, roused our
forefathers to enthusiasm. They were to them their bull-fights, their
Italian opera, their tragedy, their dancers; in short, all their
drama. The performance of Mysteries was a later thing than these
spiritual disputations, to which, perhaps, we owe the French stage.
Inspired eloquence, combining the attractions of the human voice
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: blood, but more immortal children of undying fame. The whole cycle
of the early sonnets is simply Shakespeare's invitation to Willie
Hughes to go upon the stage and become a player. How barren and
profitless a thing, he says, is this beauty of yours if it be not
used:-
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: over the rock. This scene he greatly enjoyed while sitting at
his cabin window; each wave approached the beacon like a vast
scroll unfolding; and in passing discharged a quantity of air,
which he not only distinctly felt, but was even sufficient to
lift the leaves of a book which lay before him. These waves
might be ten or twelve feet in height, and about 250 feet in
length, their smaller end being towards the north, where the
water was deep, and they were opened or cut through by the
interposition of the building and beacon. The gradual manner
in which the sea, upon these occasions, is observed to become
calm or to subside, is a very remarkable feature of this
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