| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: To noble knights in sickness, as ye know
When these have worn their tokens: let me hence
I pray you.' Then her father nodding said,
'Ay, ay, the diamond: wit ye well, my child,
Right fain were I to learn this knight were whole,
Being our greatest: yea, and you must give it--
And sure I think this fruit is hung too high
For any mouth to gape for save a queen's--
Nay, I mean nothing: so then, get you gone,
Being so very wilful you must go.'
Lightly, her suit allowed, she slipt away,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: realised, is far from reassuring. When Villon journeyed (perhaps
by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder
if he had not something of the same appearance. Something of the
same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too must have
tinkered verses as he walked, with more success than his successor.
And if he had anything like the same inspiring weather, the same
nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding down the
stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the wild
bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare inn-
chamber - the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue
of noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves - and above all, if
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: arguing about that; the accident had in fact come: it had simply
been that security had prevailed. She had taken what Hague had
given her, and her blankness in respect of his other connexions was
only a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme
reason to know so great a master could have been trusted to
produce.
This picture was for a while all our friend saw: he caught his
breath again and again as it came over him that the woman with whom
he had had for years so fine a point of contact was a woman whom
Acton Hague, of all men in the world, had more or less fashioned.
Such as she sat there to-day she was ineffaceably stamped with him.
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