| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: should that never be, should it be the will of fate that we must live
and die in the greenwood, I will live and die MAID MARIAN."[4]
[4] And therefore is she called Maid Marian
Because she leads a spotless maiden life
And shall till Robin's outlaw life have end.
Old Play.
"A pretty resolution," said the baron, "if Robin will let you keep it."
"I have sworn it," said Robin. "Should I expose her tenderness
to the perils of maternity, when life and death may hang on shifting
at a moment's notice from Sherwood to Barnsdale, and from Barnsdale
to the sea-shore? And why should I banquet when my merry men starve?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: and to reason for the power of discerning that same good--if man
cannot find truth by that method, by what method shall he find it?
And thus it happened that, though these philosophers and
encyclopaedists were not men of science, they were at least the
heralds and the coadjutors of science.
We may call them, and justly, dreamers, theorists, fanatics. But we
must recollect that one thing they meant to do, and did. They
recalled men to facts; they bid them ask of everything they saw--
What are the facts of the case? Till we know the facts, argument is
worse than useless.
Now the habit of asking for the facts of the case must deliver men
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years,
like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether
the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The
definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the
definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause
himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the
image under which he had ended by figuring his life.
They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent
together, made no allusion to that view of it; which was a sign he
was handsomely alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in fact
didn't care, always to be talking about it. Such a feature in
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