| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: observed that in those passionate natures which reserve their
force, and do not fritter away their feelings in scattered
flirtations or trivial love-affairs, there is a velocity and
momentum, when the movement of passion is once excited, greatly
transcending all that is ever felt by expansive and expressive
natures. Slow to be moved, when they do move it is with the whole
mass of the heart. So it was with me. I purchased my immunity
from earlier entanglements by the price of my whole life. I am not
what I was. Between my past and present self there is a gulf; that
gulf is dark, stormy, and profound. On the far side stands a youth
of hope, energy, ambition, and unclouded happiness, with great
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: And when in his fair parts she did abide,
She was new lodg'd and newly deified.
'His browny locks did hang in crooked curls;
And every light occasion of the wind
Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls.
What's sweet to do, to do will aptly find:
Each eye that saw him did enchant the mind;
For on his visage was in little drawn,
What largeness thinks in paradise was sawn.
'Small show of man was yet upon his chin;
His phoenix down began but to appear,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: the winter in Italy are quite shut in at present, and if war begins,
no one knows where it will spread.
LETTER: To W.D.B.
LONDON, April 7, 1848
. . . On Wednesday we had an agreeable dinner at Mrs. Milner
Gibson's. Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli, Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan (brother of
Mrs. Norton), etc., were among the guests. After dinner I had a
very long talk with Disraeli. He is, you know, of the ultra Tory
party here, and looks at the Continental movements from the darkest
point of view. He cannot admit as a possibility the renovation of
European society upon more liberal principles, and considers it as
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