| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke: upon
his folded hands. He slipped into the unknown.
How long afterward conscious life returned to him he did not
know.
The blank might have been an hour or a century. He knew only
that
omething had happened in the interval. What is was he could not
tell.
He found great difficulty in catching the thread of his identity
again.
He felt that he was himself; but the trouble was to make his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: He found his way in foreign cities by divination, his memory
was excellent when once his attention had been at all
cordially given, and he emerged from dialogues in foreign tongues,
of which he had, formally, not understood a word, in full
possession of the particular fact he had desired to ascertain.
His appetite for facts was capacious, and although many of those
which he noted would have seemed woefully dry and colorless to
the ordinary sentimental traveler, a careful inspection of the list
would have shown that he had a soft spot in his imagination.
In the charming city of Brussels--his first stopping-place after
leaving Paris--he asked a great many questions about the street-cars,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: Bargeton went to a ridotto given to the town by a regiment, and fell
in love with an officer of a good family, a sub-lieutenant, to whom
the crafty Napoleon had given a glimpse of the baton of a Marshal of
France. Love, restrained, greater and nobler than the ties that were
made and unmade so easily in those days, was consecrated coldly by the
hands of death. On the battlefield of Wagram a shell shattered the
only record of Mme. de Bargeton's young beauty, a portrait worn on the
heart of the Marquis of Cante-Croix. For long afterwards she wept for
the young soldier, the colonel in his second campaign, for the heart
hot with love and glory that set a letter from Nais above Imperial
favor. The pain of those days cast a veil of sadness over her face, a
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