| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: superstitions, imagining them to be inherent in the heart that
lavishes them upon us. It is this wonderful response of one nature to
another, this religious belief, this certainty of finding peculiar or
excessive happiness in the presence of one we love, that accounts in
part for perdurable attachments and long-lived passion. If a woman
possesses the genius of her sex, love never comes to be a matter of
use and wont. She brings all her heart and brain to love, clothes her
tenderness in forms so varied, there is such art in her most natural
moments, or so much nature in her art, that in absence her memory is
almost as potent as her presence. All other women are as shadows
compared with her. Not until we have lost or known the dread of losing
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: Greece'). A gratifying fact in regard to this election is that it
comes without the knowledge of Mr. Bancroft, and without any of
those preliminary visits on his part, and those appeals to
academicians whose votes are desired, that are so common with
candidates for vacancies at the Institute. The honor acquires
double value for being unsought, and I have heard with no small
satisfaction several Members of the Academy contrast the modest
reserve of Mr. Bancroft with the restless manoeuvres to which they
have been accustomed. Prescott, you know, is already a member, and
I think America may be satisfied with two out of seven of a class of
History which is selected from the world."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: "An ancient home of peace."
It is a place where one who had been wearied and perchance sore
wounded in the battle of life might well desire to be carried, as
Arthur to the island valley of Avilion, for rest and healing.
I have no thought of renewing the conflicts and cares that filled
that summer with sorrow. There were fightings without and fears
within; there was the surrender of an enterprise that had been
cherished since boyhood, and the bitter sense of irremediable
weakness that follows such a reverse; there was a touch of that
wrath with those we love, which, as Coleridge says,
"Doth work like madness in the brain;"
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