| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: green knoll on which stands the whitewashed church.
As yet the panic of the steed had given his unskilful rider
an apparent advantage in the chase, but just as he had got half
way through the hollow, the girths of the saddle gave way, and he
felt it slipping from under him. He seized it by the pommel, and
endeavored to hold it firm, but in vain; and had just time to
save himself by clasping old Gunpowder round the neck, when the
saddle fell to the earth, and he heard it trampled under foot by
his pursuer. For a moment the terror of Hans Van Ripper's wrath
passed across his mind, --for it was his Sunday saddle; but this
was no time for petty fears; the goblin was hard on his haunches;
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: not sure if I myself, thus placed, would acquit myself so well. And there
was in his sweetness a contagion that strangely reconciled me to the
troubled aspects of our national hour. I thought, "Invisible among our
eighty millions there is a quiet legion living untainted in the depths,
while the yellow rich, the prismatic scum and bubbles, boil on the
surface." Yes, he had accidentally helped me, and I wished doubly that I
might help him. It was well enough he should feel he must not shirk his
duty, but how much better if he could be led to see that marrying where
he did not love was no duty of his.
I knew what I had to say to him, but lacked the beginning of it; and of
this beginning I was in search as we drove up among the live-oaks of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: up to, naturally grows up to its limit sooner. It may even be
questioned whether it does not do so with the more haste; on the
same principle that a runner who has less distance to travel not
only accomplishes his course quicker, but moves with relatively
greater speed, or as a small planet grows old not simply sooner, but
comparatively faster than a larger one. Jupiter is still in his
fiery youth, while the moon is senile in decrepid old age, and yet
his separate existence began long before hers. Either hypothesis
will explain the abnormally early development of the Chinese race,
and its subsequent career of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful
nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present
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