| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: to publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or
sciolism (and that such defects exist in these pages, I cannot but fear)
would be instantly detected, and severely censured: but nevertheless,
it seemed to me that Cambridge was the fittest place in which they could
see the light, because to Cambridge I mainly owe what little right
method or sound thought may be found in them, or indeed, in anything
which I have ever written. In the heyday of youthful greediness and
ambition, when the mind, dazzled by the vastness and variety of the
universe, must needs know everything, or rather know about everything,
at once and on the spot, too many are apt, as I have been in past years,
to complain of Cambridge studies as too dry and narrow: but as time
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: cast her down with a concussion on the summit of the reef, where
she lay on her beam-ends, her back broken, buried in breaching
seas, but safe. Conceive a table: the EBER in the darkness had
been smashed against the rim and flung below; the ADLER, cast free
in the nick of opportunity, had been thrown upon the top. Many
were injured in the concussion; many tossed into the water; twenty
perished. The survivors crept again on board their ship, as it now
lay, and as it still remains, keel to the waves, a monument of the
sea's potency. In still weather, under a cloudless sky, in those
seasons when that ill-named ocean, the Pacific, suffers its vexed
shores to rest, she lies high and dry, the spray scarce touching
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: hopes, and so increase the strength of her illusions.
"Ah! madame, he will come. He is not far off. I haven't a doubt he is
living, and on his way," replied Brigitte. "I put a key in the Bible,
and I held it on my fingers while Cottin read a chapter in the gospel
of Saint John; and, madame, the key never turned at all!"
"Is that a good sign?" asked the countess.
"Oh! madame, that's a well-known sign. I would wager my salvation, he
still lives. God would not so deceive us."
"Ah! if he would only come--no matter for his danger here."
"Poor Monsieur Auguste!" cried Brigitte, "he must be toiling along the
roads on foot."
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