| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: Unpitied; for he groped as blind, and seem'd
Always about to fall, grasping the pews
And oaken finials till he touch'd the door;
Yet to the lychgate, where his chariot stood,
Strode from the porch, tall and erect again.
But nevermore did either pass the gate
Save under pall with bearers. In one month,
Thro' weary and yet wearier hours,
The childless mother went to seek her child;
And when he felt the silence of his house
About him, and the change and not the change,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: Felipe would shed bitter tears and redouble their caresses, and
the wicked old man's insinuating voice would take an affectionate
tone--"Ah, you will forgive me, will you not, dear friends, dear
wife? I am rather a nuisance. Alas, Lord in heaven, how canst
Thou use me as the instrument by which Thou provest these two
angelic creatures? I who should be the joy of their lives am
become their scourge . . ."
In this manner he kept them tethered to his pillow, blotting out
the memory of whole months of fretfulness and unkindness in one
short hour when he chose to display for them the ever-new
treasures of his pinchbeck tenderness and charm of manner--a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: labourers, till chance or instinct led me to the place that was my
father's. The stone had been erected (I knew already) "by
admiring friends"; I could now judge their taste in monuments;
their taste in literature, methought, I could imagine, and I
refrained from drawing near enough to read the terms of the
inscription. But the name was in larger letters and stared at
me--JAMES K. DODD. What a singular thing is a name, I
thought; how it clings to a man, and continually misrepresents,
and then survives him; and it flashed across my mind, with a
mixture of regret and bitter mirth, that I had never known, and
now probably never should know, what the K had represented.
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