| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: many of them followed after Knox. It is not simply because a
man is always fully persuaded that he knows the right from
the wrong and sees his way plainly through the maze of life,
great qualities as these are, that people will love and
follow him, and write him letters full of their "earnest
desire for him" when he is absent. It is not over a man,
whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the
hearts of women are "incensed and kindled with a special
care," as it were over their natural children. In the strong
quiet patience of all his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes,
we may perhaps see one cause of the fascination he possessed
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: account at old manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his
wretched boys, who cheat him, and pay each other to answer to
truants' names. The class is all wrong. "One is barefoot,
another's shoe is burst, another cries, another writes home. Then
comes the rod, the sound of blows, and howls; and the day passes in
tears." "Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows; there is
hardly time to eat." I have no space to finish the picture of the
stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while
it starved his body. However, happier days came. Gilbert Kennedy,
Earl of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman,
took him as his tutor for the next five years; and with him he went
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 1492 by Mary Johntson: his knees, his gray-blue eyes looking further than the far
mountains. Later, on the shore, he and the Adelantado
walked up and down under palm trees. The crews watched
them, knowing they were planning.
What they planned came forth the next day, and it was
nothing short of a colony, a settlement upon the banks of
the river Bethlehem.
Christopherus Columbus spoke,--tall, powerful, gaunt,
white-headed, gray-eyed, trusted because he himself so
trusted, suasive, filled with the power of his vision. His
frame was growing old, but he himself stayed young. His
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