| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: beyond the surface, like the soft, thin foam that enamels
yonder tract of ocean, belongs to it, is a part of it, yet is,
after all, but a bequest of tempests, and covers only a dark
abyss of crossing currents and desolate tangles of rootless
kelp. Everybody was drawn to her, yet not a soul took any
comfort in her. Her very voice had in it a despairing
sweetness, that seemed far in advance of her actual history; it
was an anticipated miserere, a perpetual dirge, where nothing
had yet gone down. So Aunt Jane, who was wont to be perfectly
decisive in her treatment of every human being, was fluctuating
and inconsistent with Emilia. She could not help being
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: may be partly declinable and partly indeclinable, and in some of their
cases may have fallen out of use. Here are rules with exceptions; they are
not however really exceptions, but contain in themselves indications of
other rules. Many of these interruptions or variations of analogy occur in
pronouns or in the verb of existence of which the forms were too common and
therefore too deeply imbedded in language entirely to drop out. The same
verbs in the same meaning may sometimes take one case, sometimes another.
The participle may also have the character of an adjective, the adverb
either of an adjective or of a preposition. These exceptions are as
regular as the rules, but the causes of them are seldom known to us.
Language, like the animal and vegetable worlds, is everywhere intersected
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: fifteen or twenty houses, to a "city" of two thousand
inhabitants, placed him once more in striking new relations as to
dress, manners, and society. Yet, as in the case of his removal
from his father's cabin to New Salem six years earlier, the
change was not so startling as would at first appear. In spite of
its larger population and its ambition as the new State capital,
Springfield was at that time in many ways no great improvement
upon New Salem. It had no public buildings, its streets and
sidewalks were still unpaved, and business of all kinds was
laboring under the burden of hard times.
As for himself, although he now owned a license to practise law,
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