| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Sportsman by Xenophon: end by becoming skirters[21]--a bad education.[22]
[21] {ekkunoi}, cf. Arrian, xxv. 5.
[22] {poneron mathema}, ib. 9.
As long as they are pups, they should have their food given them near
the nets, when these are being taken up,[23] so that if from
inexperience they should lose their way on the hunting-field, they may
come back for it and not be altogether lost. In time they will be quit
of this instinct themselves,[24] when their hostile feeling towards
the animal is developed, and they will be more concerned about the
quarry than disposed to give their food a thought.[25]
[23] {anairontai} sc. {ai arkues}, see above, vi. 26.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: The devil only knows what I have done,
But here I am, and here are six or eight
Good friends, who most ingenuously prate
About my songs to such and such a one.
But everything is all askew to-night, --
As if the time were come, or almost come,
For their untenanted mirage of me
To lose itself and crumble out of sight,
Like a tall ship that floats above the foam
A little while, and then breaks utterly.
Sonnet
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: V: The Boy of the Cake
One is unthankful, I suppose, to call a day so dreary when one has
lunched under the circumstances that I have attempted to indicate; the
bright spot ought to shine over the whole. But you haven't an idea what a
nightmare in the daytime Cowpens was beginning to be.
I had thumbed and scanned hundreds of ancient pages, some of them
manuscript; I had sat by ancient shelves upon hard chairs, I had sneezed
with the ancient dust, and I had not put my finger upon a trace of the
right Fanning. I should have given it up, left unexplored the territory
that remained staring at me through the backs of unread volumes, had it
not been for my Aunt Carola. To her I owed constancy and diligence, and
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