The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: It seems to me a huge Ixion's wheel,
Upon whose whirling spokes we are bound fast,
And must go with it! Ah, how bright the sun
Strikes on the sea and on the masts of vessels,
That are uplifted, in the morning air,
Like crosses of some peaceable crusade!
It makes me long to sail for lands unknown,
No matter whither! Under me, in shadow,
Gloomy and narrow, lies the little town,
Still sleeping, but to wake and toil awhile,
Then sleep again. How dismal looks the prison,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: institutions. The intertropical kingdoms of the Trade Winds are
favourable to the ordinary life of a merchantman. The trumpet-call
of strife is seldom borne on their wings to the watchful ears of
men on the decks of ships. The regions ruled by the north-east and
south-east Trade Winds are serene. In a southern-going ship, bound
out for a long voyage, the passage through their dominions is
characterized by a relaxation of strain and vigilance on the part
of the seamen. Those citizens of the ocean feel sheltered under
the aegis of an uncontested law, of an undisputed dynasty. There,
indeed, if anywhere on earth, the weather may be trusted.
Yet not too implicitly. Even in the constitutional realm of Trade
 The Mirror of the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: rubbed off them again with a brush of iron--they were yet Germans at
heart; and that German instinct for the unseen--call it enthusiasm,
mysticism, what you will, you cannot make it anything but a human
fact, and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most blessed fact--that
instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives peculiar value to German
philosophy, poetry, art, religion, and above all to German family
life, and which is just the complement needed to prevent our English
common-sense, matter-of-fact Lockism from degenerating into
materialism--that was only lying hidden, but not dead, in the German
spirit.
With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed a nobler and more
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