| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: Americans by the hundreds of thousands have known and know at this
moment, that all the best we have and are--law, ethics, love of liberty--
all of it came from England, grew in England first, ripened from the seed
of which we are merely one great harvest, planted here by England. And
yet I instantly exclaimed, "No, indeed! "
Well, having been inflicted with the anti-English complex myself, I
understand it all the better in others, and am begging them to counteract
it as I have done. You will recollect that I said at the outset of these
observations that, as I saw it, our prejudice was founded upon three
causes fairly separate, although they often melted together. With two of
these causes I have now dealt--the school histories, and certain acts and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: young damsels, the frantic dances, the exquisite music, and all the
fantastic tales of devil-worship.
So many proven facts have been first discovered by occult science,
that some day we shall have professors of occult science, as we
already have professors of chemistry and astronomy. It is even
singular that here in Paris, where we are founding chairs of Mantchu
and Slave and literatures so little professable (to coin a word) as
the literatures of the North (which, so far from providing lessons,
stand very badly in need of them); when the curriculum is full of the
everlasting lectures on Shakespeare and the sixteenth century,--it is
strange that some one has not restored the teaching of the occult
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Frances Waldeaux by Rebecca Davis: safer in the pulpit. He could take rank with scholars
there, too.
She inspected him now anxiously, trying to see him with
the eyes of these Oxford magnates. Nobody would guess
that he was only twenty-two. The bald spot on his crown
and the spectacles gave him a scholastic air, and the
finely cut features and a cold aloofness in his manner
spoke plainly, she thought, of his good descent and high
pursuits.
Frances herself had a drop of vagabond blood which found
comrades for her among every class and color. But there
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