The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: "In this extremity his father thinks it necessary to send the
Count to Paris to ask for the King's favor at court. Paris is a
very dangerous place for a lad; if he is to keep steady there, he
must have the grain of sense which makes notaries of us. Besides,
I should be heartbroken to think of the poor boy living amid such
hardships as we have known.--Do you remember the pleasure with
which we spent a day and a night there waiting to see The Marriage
of Figaro? Oh, blind that we were!--We were happy and poor, but a
noble cannot be happy in poverty. A noble in want--it is a thing
against nature! Ah! Sorbier, when one has known the satisfaction
of propping one of the grandest genealogical trees in the kingdom
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: produce. The music was that of some instrument with which they
were unacquainted; but circumstances afterwards led my ancestress
to believe that it was that of the harmonica, which she heard at
a much later period in life.
When these heaven-born sounds had ceased, a door opened in the
upper end of the apartment, and they saw Damiotti, standing at
the head of two or three steps, sign to them to advance. His
dress was so different from that which he had worn a few minutes
before, that they could hardly recognize him; and the deadly
paleness of his countenance, and a certain stern rigidity of
muscles, like that of one whose mind is made up to some strange
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due
to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any
departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope--fervently
do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by
the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil
shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash
shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said
three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The
 Second Inaugural Address |