| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems by Bronte Sisters: What dream? Erewhile the characters were clear,
Graved on my brain--at once some unknown cause
Has dimm'd and razed the thoughts, which now appear,
Like a vague remnant of some by-past scene;--
Not what will be, but what, long since, has been.
I suffer'd many things--I heard foretold
A dreadful doom for Pilate,--lingering woes,
In far, barbarian climes, where mountains cold
Built up a solitude of trackless snows,
There he and grisly wolves prowl'd side by side,
There he lived famish'd--there, methought, he died;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: might see to read her prayers through the hours of night.
"There is no faith left in the earth! . . ." she said.
In such a perilous plight did I behold the fairest and the greatest,
the truest and most life-giving of all Powers.
"Wake up, sir, the doors are just about to be shut," said a hoarse
voice. I turned and beheld the beadle's ugly countenance; the man was
shaking me by the arm, and the cathedral lay wrapped in shadows as a
man is wrapped in his cloak.
"Belief," I said to myself, "is Life! I have just witnessed the
funeral of a monarchy, now we must defend the church."
PARIS, February 183l.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Gentle Grafter by O. Henry: hard, but fat and respectable beyond all reason.
"After we talk on all the notorious themes of the day, this Murkison--
for such was his entitlements--takes a letter out of his coat pocket
in a careful, careless way and hands it to us to read.
"'Now, what do you think of that?' says he, laughing--'a letter like
that to ME!'
"Me and Andy sees at a glance what it is; but we pretend to read it
through. It was one of them old time typewritten green goods letters
explaining how for $1,000 you could get $5,000 in bills that an expert
couldn't tell from the genuine; and going on to tell how they were
made from plates stolen by an employee of the Treasury at Washington.
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