| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: his door and disinherited him.
The glittering portico of the serene, haughty house, the
repose of the well-ordered garden, still blooming with belated
flowers, seemed at once to deride and to invite the young
outcast plodding along the dusty road. "This is your
birthright," whispered the clambering rose-trees by the gate; and
the closed portals of carven bronze said: "You have sold it for
a thought--a dream."'
II
Hermas found the Grove of Daphne quite deserted. There was no
sound in the enchanted vale but the rustling of the light
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: To the man of to-day, O Leviathan, now?
A science. What wert thou to him that from ocean
First beheld thee appear? A surprise,--an emotion!
When life leaps in the veins, when it beats in the heart,
When it thrills as it fills every animate part,
Where lurks it? how works it? . . . We scarcely detect it.
But life goes: the heart dies: haste, O leech, and dissect it!
This accursed aesthetical, ethical age
Hath so finger'd life's hornbook, so blurr'd every page,
That the old glad romance, the gay chivalrous story
With its fables of faery, its legends of glory,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: work of a fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a
sister of Mrs. John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles
Frewen, clerk to the Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher
of the Black Rod, and secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied
issue in both beds, and being very rich - she died worth about
60,000L., mostly in land - she was in perpetual quest of an heir.
The mirage of this fortune hung before successive members of the
Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it dissolved and left
the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy. The grandniece,
Stephen's daughter, the one who had not 'married imprudently,'
appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad by the
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