| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: Take all these similes to your own command,
Hallow'd with sighs that burning lungs did raise;
What me your minister, for you obeys,
Works under you; and to your audit comes
Their distract parcels in combined sums.
'Lo! this device was sent me from a nun,
Or sister sanctified of holiest note;
Which late her noble suit in court did shun,
Whose rarest havings made the blossoms dote;
For she was sought by spirits of richest coat,
But kept cold distance, and did thence remove
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: This ~were~ a medley! we should have him back
Who told the "Winter's tale" to do it for us.
No matter: we will say whatever comes.
And let the ladies sing us, if they will,
From time to time, some ballad or a song
To give us breathing-space.'
So I began,
And the rest followed: and the women sang
Between the rougher voices of the men,
Like linnets in the pauses of the wind:
And here I give the story and the songs.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no
sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in
his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine
this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary
"melting moods" into which either the trials of real life, or the
theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us. Especially if we weep!
For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner
dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral
stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart
and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the customary
hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons. Many
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