| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: difference between them and us, that they fulfil their appointed
task, and we do not.
The sickly geranium which spreads its blanched leaves against the
cellar panes, and peers up, as if imploringly, to the narrow slip
of sunlight at the top of the narrow alley, had it a voice, could
tell more truly than ever a doctor in the town, why little Bessy
sickened of the scarlatina, and little Johnny of the hooping-cough,
till the toddling wee things who used to pet and water it were
carried off each and all of them one by one to the churchyard
sleep, while the father and mother sat at home, trying to supply by
gin that very vital energy which fresh air and pure water, and the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: being deem'd so, by the other, upon the single account of that Investment.
Another objection, to all this remedy, is its want of universality;
forasmuch as the shaving part of it, upon which so much stress is laid, by
an unalterable law of nature excludes one half of the species entirely from
its use: all I can say is, that female writers, whether of England, or of
France, must e'en go without it--
As for the Spanish ladies--I am in no sort of distress--
Chapter 4.LXXIV.
The seventy-fourth chapter is come at last; and brings nothing with it but
a sad signature of 'How our pleasures slip from under us in this world!'
For in talking of my digression--I declare before heaven I have made it!
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: into sight he mightn't have felt the impulse to get into relation
with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.
The pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too compromising,
the explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his
name, in such a case, out of the papers, was not definite to him:
he was so occupied with the thought of recording his Discretion -
as an effect of the vow he had just uttered to his intimate
adversary - that the importance of this loomed large and something
had overtaken all ironically his sense of proportion. If there had
been a ladder applied to the front of the house, even one of the
vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and
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