| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: 'The tempest in my boughs had cried,
The hunter slumbered in my shade,
A hundred years ere you were made.'
The second smiled as he returned:
'I shall be here when you are burned.'
So far dissension ruled the pair,
Each turned on each a frowning air,
When flickering from the bank anigh,
A flight of martens met their eye.
Sometime their course they watched; and then -
They nodded off to sleep again.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: Gurth. He weighed it upon the tip of his finger,
and made it ring by dropping it upon the table.
Had it rung too flat, or had it felt a hair's breadth
too light, generosity had carried the day; but, unhappily
for Gurth, the chime was full and true, the
zecchin plump, newly coined, and a grain above
weight. Isaac could not find in his heart to part
with it, so dropt it into his purse as if in absence of
mind, with the words, ``Eighty completes the tale,
and I trust thy master will reward thee handsomely.
---Surely,'' he added, looking earnestly at the bag,
 Ivanhoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: resigned Cassandra, for he knew his own incompetence and distrusted
himself entirely, and lost Katharine, for whom his feeling was
profound though unsatisfactory, still it appeared to him that there
was nothing else left for him to do. He was forced to go, leaving
Katharine free, as he had said, to tell her mother that the engagement
was at an end. But to do what plain duty required of an honorable man,
cost an effort which only a day or two ago would have been
inconceivable to him. That a relationship such as he had glanced at
with desire could be possible between him and Katharine, he would have
been the first, two days ago, to deny with indignation. But now his
life had changed; his attitude had changed; his feelings were
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