| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by
the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than
the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of
Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the
Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured,
and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted
and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation
in 1778. And, finally, in 1787 one of the declared objects for ordaining
and establishing the Constitution was "TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION."
But if the destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States
be lawfully possible, the Union is LESS perfect than before the Constitution,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Witch, et. al by Anton Chekhov: there was something harsh and extremely dreary in the sound of
the piping.
As the copse became sparser, and the pines were interspersed with
young birch-trees, Meliton saw a herd. Hobbled horses, cows, and
sheep were wandering among the bushes and, snapping the dry
branches, sniffed at the herbage of the copse. A lean old
shepherd, bareheaded, in a torn grey smock, stood leaning against
the wet trunk of a birch-tree. He stared at the ground, pondering
something, and played his pipe, it seemed, mechanically.
"Good-day, grandfather! God help you!" Meliton greeted him in a
thin, husky voice which seemed incongruous with his huge stature
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: fortune went to pacify my husband's creditors. Monsieur de
Maufrigneuse was forty-eight years of age when I married him; but
those years were like military campaigns, they ought to count for
twice what they were. Ah! what a life I led for ten years! If any one
had known the suffering of this poor, calumniated little woman! To be
watched by a mother jealous of her daughter! Heavens! You who make
dramas, you will never invent anything as direful as that. Ordinarily,
according to the little that I know of literature, a drama is a suite
of actions, speeches, movements which hurry to a catastrophe; but what
I speak of was a catastrophe in action. It was an avalanche fallen in
the morning and falling again at night only to fall again the next
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