| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: when she would find strength to take it altogether back
if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But
with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and
incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about
only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct;
and the fineness of her feeling for him made that
unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would
always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged
him to the practice of the same virtues.
All this tended to draw him back into his old habits
of mind. If her simplicity had been the simplicity of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: cultured style of Cicero, and was welcomed by them as the
philosophical panegyric of their state. The last notice of it in
Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the
stable polity formed out of these elements as a constitution easier
to commend than to produce and in no case lasting. Yet Polybius
had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had prophesied the
rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the ochlocracy
fifty years and more before there was joy in the Julian household
over the birth of that boy who, born to power as the champion of
the people, died wearing the purple of a king.
No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: But he was gone. He was the last off the ship. The sailors put their
shoulders to the gangway. A huge coil of dark rope went flying through the
air and fell "thump" on the wharf. A bell rang; a whistle shrilled.
Silently the dark wharf began to slip, to slide, to edge away from them.
Now there was a rush of water between. Fenella strained to see with all
her might. "Was that father turning round?"--or waving?--or standing
alone?--or walking off by himself? The strip of water grew broader,
darker. Now the Picton boat began to swing round steady, pointing out to
sea. It was no good looking any longer. There was nothing to be seen but
a few lights, the face of the town clock hanging in the air, and more
lights, little patches of them, on the dark hills.
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