| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: sent us children she might have been kinder to me. But God has given
us a lonely house. And she has cut my heart in two. Don't let us
talk of it. I was brutal to her this evening. But I suppose when
sinners talk to saints they are brutal always. I said to her things
that were hideously true, on my side, from my stand-point, from the
standpoint of men. But don't let us talk of that
LORD GORING. Your wife will forgive you. Perhaps at this moment she
is forgiving you. She loves you, Robert. Why should she not
forgive?
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. God grant it! God grant it! [Buries his face
in his hands.] But there is something more I have to tell you,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: known error, or am determined by my own ease in a doubtful question
of this importance, how dreadful is my crime!"
"No disease of the imagination," answered Imlac, "is so difficult
of cure as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt; fancy
and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift
their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from
the dictates of the other. If fancy presents images not moral or
religious, the mind drives them away when they give it pain; but
when melancholy notions take the form of duty, they lay hold on the
faculties without opposition, because we are afraid to exclude or
banish them. For this reason the superstitious are often
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: still on that occasion, and he was outlawed, both as a traitor to
the state and as a robber and cateran. Garrisons were now
settled in many places where a red-coat had never before been
seen, and the Saxon war-drum resounded among the most hidden
recesses of the Highland mountains. The fate of MacTavish became
every day more inevitable; and it was the more difficult for him
to make his exertions for defence or escape, that Elspat, amid
his evil days, had increased his family with an infant child,
which was a considerable encumbrance upon the necessary rapidity
of their motions.
At length the fatal day arrived. In a strong pass on the skirts
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