| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: For this had been all day at bottom the spell of the picture--that
it was essentially more than anything else a scene and a stage,
that the very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and
the tone of the sky. The play and the characters had, without his
knowing it till now, peopled all his space for him, and it seemed
somehow quite happy that they should offer themselves, in the
conditions so supplied, with a kind of inevitability. It was as if
the conditions made them not only inevitable, but so much more
nearly natural and right as that they were at least easier,
pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had nowhere so asserted
their difference from those of Woollett as they appeared to him to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: living to dance. He is always in a peck o' troubles, while I slip
along in a devil-may-care way. We have come along about even in life;
we've got the same snow on our heads, the same funds in our pockets,
and I supply him with rope to ring his bell. He's a republican and I'm
not even a publican,--that's all the difference as far as I can see. A
peasant may do good or do evil (according to your ideas) and he'll go
out of the world just as he came into it, in rags; while you wear the
fine clothes."
No one interrupted Pere Fourchon, who seemed to owe his eloquence to
his potations. At first Sibilet tried to cut him short, but desisted
at a sign from Blondet. The abbe, the general, and the countess, all
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind,
That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains.
The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us,
And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years;
But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us
In the strangeness of home-coming, and a faithful woman's eyes.
Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us --
Nothing now to comfort us, but love's road home: --
Over there beyond the darkness there's a window gleams to greet us,
And a warm hearth waits for us within.
Come away! come away! -- or the roving-fiend will hold us,
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