| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: the man who had heard mass in the garret three days ago.
"Who is it?" he asked; "who is the man with----"
"That is the headsman," answered M. Ragon, calling the executioner--
the executeur des hautes oeuvres--by the name he had borne under the
Monarchy.
"Oh! my dear, my dear! M. l'Abbe is dying!" cried out old Madame
Ragon. She caught up a flask of vinegar, and tried to restore the old
priest to consciousness.
"He must have given me the handkerchief that the King used to wipe his
brow on the way to his martyrdom," murmured he. " . . . Poor man!
. . . There was a heart in the steel blade, when none was found in all
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: tutor to a son of the Viscomte de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of
Andernach, who had taught anatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius,
and learned from him to dissect. We next find him setting up as a
medical man amid the wild volcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling
still with poverty, like Erasmus, like George Buchanan, like almost
every great scholar in those days; for students then had to wander
from place to place, generally on foot, in search of new teachers,
in search of books, in search of the necessaries of life; undergoing
such an amount of bodily and mental toil as makes it wonderful that
all of them did not--as some of them doubtless did--die under the
hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious Muses for the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: of his fond infirmities. The young lady produced an impression of
auburn hair and black velvet, and had on her other hand a companion
of obscurer type, presumably a waiting-maid. She herself might
perhaps have been a foreign countess, and before she addressed me I
had beguiled our sorry interval by finding in her a vague recall of
the opening of some novel of Madame Sand. It didn't make her more
fathomable to pass in a few minutes from this to the certitude that
she was American; it simply engendered depressing reflexions as to
the possible check to contributions from Boston. She asked me if,
as a person apparently more initiated, I would recommend further
waiting, and I answered that if she considered I was on my honour I
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