| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: A wonder in the forest glade: he still,
Unthinkable Aladdin, dawn and dark,
Scribbles and scribbles, like a German clerk.
We see the fact, but tell, O tell us why?
My reverend washman and wise butler cry.
Meanwhile at times the manifold
Imperishable perfumes of the past
And coloured pictures rise on me thick and fast:
And I remember the white rime, the loud
Lamplitten city, shops, and the changing crowd;
And I remember home and the old time,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: presence is already gone, yet their mere memory lends to these
cliffs a human interest. Where a stranded vessel lies, thither
all steps converge, so long as one plank remains upon another.
There centres the emotion. All else is but the setting, and the
eye sweeps with indifference the line of unpeopled rocks. They
are barren, till the imagination has tenanted them with
possibilities of danger and dismay. The ocean provides the
scenery and properties of a perpetual tragedy, but the interest
arrives with the performers. Till then the shores remain
vacant, like the great conventional armchairs of the French
drama, that wait for Rachel to come and die.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: and champions. His blunder in missing the Kid's right ear only a
sixteenth of an inch when he pulled his gun did not lessen the
indiscretion of the better marksman.
The Kid, not being equipped with a retinue, nor bountifully supplied
with personal admirers and supporters--on account of a rather
umbrageous reputation, even for the border--considered it not
incompatible with his indispensable gameness to perform that judicious
tractional act known as "pulling his freight."
Quickly the avengers gathered and sought him. Three of them overtook
him within a rod of the station. The Kid turned and showed his teeth
in that brilliant but mirthless smile that usually preceded his deeds
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