| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: "I went to her, and though I could not persuade her, that the
quarrel between me and Mr. Venables would never be made up, still
she agreed to conceal me for the present; yet assuring me at the
same time, shaking her head, that, when a woman was once married,
she must bear every thing. Her pale face, on which appeared a
thousand haggard lines and delving wrinkles, produced by what is
emphatically termed fretting, inforced her remark; and I had
afterwards an opportunity of observing the treatment she had to
endure, which grizzled her into patience. She toiled from morning
till night; yet her husband would rob the till, and take away the
money reserved for paying bills; and, returning home drunk, he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: brought flowers from the fence-thickets of the great field; and out
of the disorder of flowers and provisions suddenly appeared as
orderly a scheme for the feast as the marshal had shaped for the
procession. I began to respect the Bowdens for their inheritance
of good taste and skill and a certain pleasing gift of formality.
Something made them do all these things in a finer way than most
country people would have done them. As I looked up and down the
tables there was a good cheer, a grave soberness that shone with
pleasure, a humble dignity of bearing. There were some who should
have sat below the salt for lack of this good breeding; but they
were not many. So, I said to myself, their ancestors may have sat
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: problems of humanity.
Yes, those old despotisms we trust are dead, and never to revive.
But their corpses are the corpses, not of our enemies, but of our
friends and predecessors, slain in the world-old fight of Ormuzd
against Ahriman--light against darkness, order against disorder.
Confusedly they fought, and sometimes ill: but their corpses piled
the breach and filled the trench for us, and over their corpses we
step on to what should be to us an easy victory--what may be to us,
yet, a shameful ruin.
For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of the earth and the
light of the world, what if the salt should lose its savour? What
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