| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, given November 19, 1863
on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA
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Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth
upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether
that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . .
can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: understand common grammar and syntax; that they are not able to
spell any word out of the usual road, nor even in their prefaces
write common sense or intelligible English. Then for their
observations and predictions, they are such as will equally suit
any age or country in the world. "This month a certain great
person will be threatened with death or sickness." This the
news-papers will tell them; for there we find at the end of the
year, that no month passes without the death of some person of
note; and it would be hard if it should be otherwise, when there
are at least two thousand persons of not in this kingdom, many of
them old, and the almanack-maker has the liberty of chusing the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: Been tempered by the least admixture
Of that discreditable shoddy,
Should we to-day compound our toddy,
Or gaily marry song and laughter
Below its sempiternal rafter?
Not so!' the Deacon cried.
The mansion
Had marked his fatuous expansion.
The years were full, the house was fated,
The rotten structure crepitated!
A moment, and the silent guests
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