| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: He mocks the most of all;
But as the jest and laugh go round,
Each in his neighbor's eyes
Reads, while he flouts his heart's desire,
The knowledge that he lies.
Not one of us but had some pearls
And flung them to the swine,
Not one of us but had some gift--
Some spark of fire divine--
Each might have been God's minister
In the temple of some art--
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: to-morrow.'"
CHAPTER XXX
Some three evenings after he received this last report of
the progress of affairs in Paris, Bernard, upon whom the burden
of exile sat none the more lightly as the days went on,
turned out of the Strand into one of the theatres. He had been
gloomily pushing his way through the various London densities--
the November fog, the nocturnal darkness, the jostling crowd.
He was too restless to do anything but walk, and he had been
saying to himself, for the thousandth time, that if he had
been guilty of a misdemeanor in succumbing to the attractions
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil: Ere looked for by the foe. Not thus the tribes
Of Scythia by the far Maeotic wave,
Where turbid Ister whirls his yellow sands,
And Rhodope stretched out beneath the pole
Comes trending backward. There the herds they keep
Close-pent in byres, nor any grass is seen
Upon the plain, nor leaves upon the tree:
But with snow-ridges and deep frost afar
Heaped seven ells high the earth lies featureless:
Still winter? still the north wind's icy breath!
Nay, never sun disparts the shadows pale,
Georgics |
