| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: small-minded enough to resent this.
Lucien, now in high favor with men who secretly pulled the wires of
power, was so completely indifferent to literary fame, that he did not
care about the success of his romance, republished under its real
title, L'Archer de Charles IX., or the excitement caused by his volume
of sonnets called Les Marguerites, of which Dauriat sold out the
edition in a week.
"It is posthumous fame," said he, with a laugh, to Mademoiselle des
Touches, who congratulated him.
The terrible Spaniard held his creature with an iron hand, keeping him
in the road towards the goal where the trumpets and gifts of victory
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: The crescent finished, painted, sold!
The stars proceeded in their courses,
Nature with her subversive forces,
Time, too, the iron-toothed and sinewed,
And the edacious years continued.
Thrones rose and fell; and still the crescent,
Unsanative and now senescent,
A plastered skeleton of lath,
Looked forward to a day of wrath.
In the dead night, the groaning timber
Would jar upon the ear of slumber,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: in a great cause, his family had kept a little glimmering lamp alight
ever since. It hung there, beside the tomb.
"And that's never gone out in all this time?" asked the American girl.
"Never," she was told.
"Well, it's out now, anyway," and she blew it out.
All the Americans who heard this were shocked all but one, who said:
"Well, I think she was right."
There you are! There you have us at our very worst! And with this plump
specimen of the American in Europe at his very worst, I turn back to the
English: only, pray do not fail to give those other Americans who were
shocked by the outrage of the lamp their due. How wide of the mark would
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