| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: Petrovitch, and was (if the truth must be confessed) the result of
certain carefully measured supplies of brandy which Prince Boris
himself had carried to the imprisoned poet.
After the sterlets had melted away to their backbones, and the
roasted geese had shrunk into drumsticks and breastplates, and here
and there a guest's ears began to redden with more rapid blood,
Prince Alexis judged that the time for diversion had arrived. He
first filled up the idiot's basin with fragments of all the dishes
within his reach,--fish, stewed fruits, goose fat, bread, boiled
cabbage, and beer,--the idiot grinning with delight all the while,
and singing, "Ne uyesjai golubchik moi," (Don't go away, my
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: to be believed in his own case against an English Protestant, who
is true to his government, I shall leave to the candid and
impartial reader.
The other objection is the unhappy occasion of this discourse,
and relates to an article in my predictions, which foretold the
death of Mr. Partridge, to happen on March 29, 1708. This he is
pleased to contradict absolutely in the almanack he has published
for the present year, and in that ungentlemanly manner (pardon
the expression) as I have above related. In that work he very
roundly asserts, That he is not only now alive, but was likewise
alive upon that very 29th of March, when I had foretold he should
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: inflicted a hundred or a thousand years after an offence had been
committed. Suffering there might be as a part of education, but not
hopeless or protracted; as there might be a retrogression of individuals or
of bodies of men, yet not such as to interfere with a plan for the
improvement of the whole (compare Laws.)
9. But some one will say: That we cannot reason from the seen to the
unseen, and that we are creating another world after the image of this,
just as men in former ages have created gods in their own likeness. And
we, like the companions of Socrates, may feel discouraged at hearing our
favourite 'argument from analogy' thus summarily disposed of. Like
himself, too, we may adduce other arguments in which he seems to have
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