| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso: Out of that heavenly path, wherein he paced,
Yet thousand wiles and thousand ways she proved,
To have that castle fair of goodness raised:
She used those looks and smiles that most behoved
To melt the frost which his hard heart embraced,
And gainst his breast a thousand shot she ventured,
Yet was the fort so strong it was not entered.
LXIV
The dame who thought that one blink of her eye
Could make the chastest heart feel love's sweet pain,
Oh, how her pride abated was hereby!
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: "'Just in from a gold-hunting expedition on the coast of Costa Rica,'
he explained. 'Second mate of a banana steamer told me the natives
were panning out enough from the beach sands to buy all the rum, red
calico, and parlour melodeons in the world. The day I got there a
syndicate named Incorporated Jones gets a government concession to all
minerals from a given point. For a next choice I take coast fever and
count green and blue lizards for six weeks in a grass hut. I had to be
notified when I was well, for the reptiles were actually there. Then I
shipped back as third cook on a Norwegian tramp that blew up her
boiler two miles below Quarantine. I was due to bust through that
cellar door here to-night, so I hurried the rest of the way up the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: Chapter 3.LXXVIII.
A delusive, delicious consultation or two of this kind, betwixt my uncle
Toby and Trim, upon the demolition of Dunkirk,--for a moment rallied back
the ideas of those pleasures, which were slipping from under him:--still--
still all went on heavily--the magic left the mind the weaker--Stillness,
with Silence at her back, entered the solitary parlour, and drew their
gauzy mantle over my uncle Toby's head;--and Listlessness, with her lax
fibre and undirected eye, sat quietly down beside him in his arm-chair.--No
longer Amberg and Rhinberg, and Limbourg, and Huy, and Bonn, in one year,--
and the prospect of Landen, and Trerebach, and Drusen, and Dendermond, the
next,--hurried on the blood:--No longer did saps, and mines, and blinds,
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