| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Case of The Lamp That Went Out by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: "Oh, indeed, sir, chance favoured me at every turn," replied Muller
modestly.
"There is no such thing as chance," said the commissioner. "We
might as well be honest with ourselves. Any one might have seen,
doubtless did see, all the things you saw, but no one else had the
insight to recognise their value, nor the skill to follow them up
to such a conclusion. But it's a sad case, a sad case. I never
wrote a warrant with a heavier heart. Thorne is a true-hearted
gentleman, while the scoundrel he killed..."
"Yes, sir, I feel that way about it myself. I can confess now that
there was one moment when I was ready to-well, just to say nothing.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: innumerable forged epistles, a great many epigrams, biographies of the
meanest and most meagre description, a sham philosophy which was the
bastard progeny of the union between Hellas and the East? Only in
Plutarch, in Lucian, in Longinus, in the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and
Julian, in some of the Christian fathers are there any traces of good sense
or originality, or any power of arousing the interest of later ages. And
when new books ceased to be written, why did hosts of grammarians and
interpreters flock in, who never attain to any sound notion either of
grammar or interpretation? Why did the physical sciences never arrive at
any true knowledge or make any real progress? Why did poetry droop and
languish? Why did history degenerate into fable? Why did words lose their
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: in England and fully entitled to be called "great princes"; and he
in corroboration of his view read me Sonnets CXXIV. and CXXV., in
which Shakespeare tells us that his love is not "the child of
state," that it "suffers not in smiling pomp," but is "builded far
from accident." I listened with a good deal of interest, for I
don't think the point had ever been made before; but what followed
was still more curious, and seemed to me at the time to dispose
entirely of Pembroke's claim. We know from Meres that the Sonnets
had been written before 1598, and Sonnet CIV. informs us that
Shakespeare's friendship for Mr. W. H. had been already in
existence for three years. Now Lord Pembroke, who was born in
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