| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: persons of good natural disposition, if brought up to expect such
deference, are roused to unreasoning fury, and sometimes to the
commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightest challenge to their
authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken, untruthful,
slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the indulgence
of the country house. But let him dare to be "disrespectful" and he
is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, most diligent,
most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county. Dickens's
instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than
when he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to "be umble," knowing
that if he carried out that precept he might be pretty well anything
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: You ceased, and the day returned, rosy, with virgin looks.
And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder, and dew;
And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock is fair.
Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;
And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers of rain.
Vailima.
XL - AN END OF TRAVEL
LET now your soul in this substantial world
Some anchor strike. Be here the body moored; -
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: almost invariably for the nobles, a matter of life or death. To fully
understand the eager curiosity and searching inquiry which animated on
this occasion the Norman countenances of all these rejected visitors,
but more especially to enter into Madame de Dey's secret anxieties, it
is necessary to explain the role she played at Carentan. The critical
position in which she stood at this moment being that of many others
during the Revolution the sympathies and recollections of more than
one reader will help to give color to this narrative.
Madame de Dey, widow of a lieutenant-general, chevalier of the Orders,
had left the court at the time of the emigration. Possessing a good
deal of property in the neighborhood of Carentan, she took refuge in
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