| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: Don't you think it dreadfully humiliating? I wished
I was dead for hours after, but I don't mind now."
"I have come to clean away these cobwebs," said Yeobright.
"Would you like to help me--by high-class teaching? We
might benefit them much."
"I don't quite feel anxious to. I have not much love
for my fellow-creatures. Sometimes I quite hate them."
"Still I think that if you were to hear my scheme you might
take an interest in it. There is no use in hating people--if
you hate anything, you should hate what produced them."
"Do you mean Nature? I hate her already. But I shall
Return of the Native |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: speech to a close with the short and telling appeal:
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let
us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
The attention with which it was followed, the applause that
greeted its telling points, and the enthusiasm of the Republican
journals next morning showed that Lincoln's Cooper Institute
speech had taken New York by storm. It was printed in full in
four of the leading daily papers of the city, and immediately
reprinted in pamphlet form. From New York Mr. Lincoln made a tour
of speech-making through several of the New England States, where
he was given a hearty welcome, and listened to with an eagerness
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: person was made by yourself. You began with your ring, which was of your
own workmanship, and you said that you could engrave rings; and you had
another seal which was also of your own workmanship, and a strigil and an
oil flask, which you had made yourself; you said also that you had made the
shoes which you had on your feet, and the cloak and the short tunic; but
what appeared to us all most extraordinary and a proof of singular art, was
the girdle of your tunic, which, you said, was as fine as the most costly
Persian fabric, and of your own weaving; moreover, you told us that you had
brought with you poems, epic, tragic, and dithyrambic, as well as prose
writings of the most various kinds; and you said that your skill was also
pre-eminent in the arts which I was just now mentioning, and in the true
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