| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry: End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI.
The Gift of the Magi |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: break. You may be sure, after the friendly freedoms of your
criticism (necessary I am sure, and wholesome I know, but
untimely to the poor labourer in his landslip) that mighty
little of it will stand.
Our Paul has come into a fortune, and wishes to go home to
the Hie Germanie. This is a tile on our head, and if a
shower, which is now falling, lets up, I must go down to
Apia, and see if I can find a substitute of any kind. This
is, from any point of view, disgusting; above all, from that
of work; for, whatever the result, the mill has to be kept
turning; apparently dust, and not flour, is the proceed.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: Cyrus and his handful of Persians struck at the Medes; as Alexander
and his handful of Greeks struck afterwards at the Persians--and
behold, it collapsed upon the spot. And then the victors took the
place of the conquered; and became in their turn an aristocracy, and
then a despotism; and in their turn rotted down and perished. And
so the vicious circle repeated itself, age after age, from Egypt and
Assyria to Mexico and Peru.
And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have need to watch, and
sternly watch, ourselves. Equality of some kind or other is, as I
said, our natural and seemingly inevitable goal. But which
equality? For there are two--a true one and a false; a noble and a
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