| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: Why am I crying after love,
With youth, a singing voice, and eyes
To take earth's wonder with surprise?
Why have I put off my pride,
Why am I unsatisfied, --
I, for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light, --
I, for whom all beauty burns
Like incense in a million urns?
O beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On Horsemanship by Xenophon: admires;[1] the purchase is effected, and he has brought him home--how
is he to be housed? It is best that the stable should be placed in a
quarter of the establishment where the master will see the horse as
often as possible.[2] It is a good thing also to have his stall so
arranged that there will be as little risk of the horse's food being
stolen from the manger, as of the master's from his larder or store-
closet. To neglect a detail of this kind is surely to neglect oneself;
since in the hour of danger, it is certain, the owner has to consign
himself, life and limb, to the safe keeping of his horse.
[1] Lit. "To proceed: when you have bought a horse which you admire
and have brought him home."
On Horsemanship |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: CHAPTER III
PRELIMINARIES
Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for
the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary
tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that
the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a
pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth
Thermidor. On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this
catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to
Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies
were beginning to yield. On the way he met a young man in the
Modeste Mignon |
