| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: whereupon I admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself ill. What
I referred to was what I had referred to the night we met in Upper
Baker Street--the relative importance (relative to virtue) of other
gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift--a thing handed to
us in a parcel on our first birthday; and I declared that this very
enquiry proved to me the problem had already caught her by the
skirt. She would have help however, the same help I myself had
once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross.
"What help do you mean?"
"That of the member for Clockborough."
She stared, smiled, then returned: "Why my idea has been to help
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: 'Even thus,' quoth she, 'he seized on my lips
And with her lips on his did act the seizure
And as she fetched breath, away he skips,
And would not take her meaning nor her pleasure.
Ah, that I had my lady at this bay,
To kiss and clip me till I run away!
XII.
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together
Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: And I: "The proofs, which show the truth to me,
Are the works subsequent, whereunto Nature
Ne'er heated iron yet, nor anvil beat."
'Twas answered me: "Say, who assureth thee
That those works ever were? the thing itself
That must be proved, nought else to thee affirms it."
"Were the world to Christianity converted,"
I said, "withouten miracles, this one
Is such, the rest are not its hundredth part;
Because that poor and fasting thou didst enter
Into the field to sow there the good plant,
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
