| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats
of justice are filled with judges, who hold their office under an
open and palpable _bribe_, and are bound, in deciding in the case
of a man's liberty, _to hear only his accusers!_
In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the
forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the
defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this fugitive slave law
stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if
there be another nation on the globe having the brass and the
baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If any man in
this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: Then the man,
`His deeds yet live, the worst is yet to come.
Yet let your sleep for this one night be sound:
I do forgive him!'
`Thanks, my love,' she said,
`Your own will be the sweeter,' and they slept.
THE GRANDMOTHER.
THE GRANDMOTHER.
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I.
And Willy, my eldest-born, is gone, you say, little
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: opposite side, that flat-topped wall of rock towers up shoreless
into the sky, seven hundred feet perpendicular; the deepest water
of all we know is at its very foot. Right and left, two shoulders
of down slope into the lake. Now turn round and look down the
gorge. Remark that this pebble bank on which we stand reaches some
fifty yards downward: you see the loose stones peeping out
everywhere. We may fairly suppose that we stand on a dam of loose
stones, a hundred feet deep.
But why loose stones? - and if so, what matter? and what wonder?
There are rocks cropping out everywhere down the hill-side.
Because if you will take up one of these stones and crack it
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