| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Hiero by Xenophon: effort they will undergo all pains, endure all perils. It would
further seem that even you, you tyrants, in spite of all that sea of
trouble which a tyranny involves, rush headlong in pursuit of it. You
must be honoured. All the world shall be your ministers; they shall
carry out your every injunction with unhestitating zeal.[2] You shall
be the cynosure of neighbouring eyes; men shall rise from their seats
at your approach; they shall step aside to yield you passage in the
streets.[3] All present shall at all times magnify you,[4] and shall
pay homage to you both with words and deeds. Those, I take it, are
ever the kind of things which subjects do to please the monarch,[5]
and thus they treat each hero of the moment, whom they strive to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: injected and gorged with the multitudinous home-going of the daily
workers, he loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering
excitements of the late hours. And he went out southward and
eastward into gaunt regions of reeking toil. As yet he knew nothing
of the realities of industrialism. He saw only the beauty of the
great chimneys that rose against the sullen smoke-barred sunsets,
and he felt only the romance of the lurid shuddering flares that
burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit the emptiness of
strange and slovenly streets. . . .
And this London was only the foreground of the great scene upon
which he, as a prosperous, well-befriended young Englishman, was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: measure. But the worst was yet to come; for he added, turning to
his son - "You can ask Mackellar; he was here and saw it."
"Is it true, Mr. Mackellar?" asked the child. "And did you really
see the devil?"
"I have not heard the tale," I replied; "and I am in a press of
business." So far I said a little sourly, fencing with the
embarrassment of the position; and suddenly the bitterness of the
past, and the terror of that scene by candle-light, rushed in upon
my mind. I bethought me that, for a difference of a second's
quickness in parade, the child before me might have never seen the
day; and the emotion that always fluttered round my heart in that
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