| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems of William Blake by William Blake: Thel answerd, O thou little virgin of the peaceful valley.
Giving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless, the o'er tired
The breath doth nourish the innocent lamb, he smells the milky garments
He crops thy flowers while thou sittest smiling in his face,
Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.
Thy wine doth purify the golden honey; thy perfume.
Which thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass that springs
Revives the milked cow, & tames the fire-breathing steed.
But Thel is like a faint cloud kindled at the rising sun:
I vanish from my pearly throne, and who shall find my place.
Queen of the vales the Lily answered, ask the tender cloud,
Poems of William Blake |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: dwellings for the first time after several days. There were barns and
peasants' cabins to destroy, and pits full of potatoes and beetroot;
the army had been without vitual, and now it fairly ran riot, the
first comers, as you might expect, making a clean sweep of everything.
"I was one of the last to come up. Luckily for me, sleep was the one
thing that I longed for just then. I caught sight of a barn and went
into it. I looked round and saw a score of generals and officers of
high rank, all of them men who, without flattery, might be called
great. Junot was there, and Narbonne, the Emperor's aide-de-camp, and
all the chiefs of the army. There were common soldiers there as well,
not one of whom would have given up his bed of straw to a marshal of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: American nigger." The disease spread, the flags were multiplied,
the operations of war became an egg-dance among miniature neutral
territories; and though all men took a hand in these proceedings,
all men in turn were struck with their absurdity. Mullan, Leary's
successor, warned Knappe, in an emphatic despatch, not to squander
and discredit the solemnity of that emblem which was all he had to
be a defence to his own consulate. And Knappe himself, in his
despatch of March 21st, 1889, castigates the practice with much
sense. But this was after the tragicomic culmination had been
reached, and the burnt rags of one of these too-frequently
mendacious signals gone on a progress to Washington, like Caesar's
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