| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: making much of them; but the smallest suggestion of trouble or
sorrow he received with visible impatience and dismissed again with
immediate relief. It was to this temper that he owed the felicity
of his later days; and yet here it was, if anywhere, that you could
call the man insane. A great part of this life consists in
contemplating what we cannot cure; but Mr. Henry, if he could not
dismiss solicitude by an effort of the mind, must instantly and at
whatever cost annihilate the cause of it; so that he played
alternately the ostrich and the bull. It is to this strenuous
cowardice of pain that I have to set down all the unfortunate and
excessive steps of his subsequent career. Certainly this was the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: MORAL EMBLEMS I
Poem: I
See how the children in the print
Bound on the book to see what's in 't!
O, like these pretty babes, may you
Seize and APPLY this volume too!
And while your eye upon the cuts
With harmless ardour opes and shuts,
Reader, may your immortal mind
To their sage lessons not be blind.
Poem: II
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for sparrows,
not homes for warm laughing people.
She told herself that down the street the leaves were a
splendor. The maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint
of raspberry. And the lawns had been nursed with love. But
the thought would not hold. At best the trees resembled a
thinned woodlot. There was no park to rest the eyes. And
since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat,
there was no court-house with its grounds.
She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most
pretentious building in sight, the one place which welcomed
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