| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: that, in a manner highly to be envied. But the condition - that
they should be let alone - is now no longer possible. More than a
hundred years ago, and following closely on the heels of Cook, an
irregular invasion of adventurers began to swarm about the isles of
the Pacific. The seven sleepers of Polynesia stand, still but half
aroused, in the midst of the century of competition. And the
island races, comparable to a shopful of crockery launched upon the
stream of time, now fall to make their desperate voyage among pots
of brass and adamant.
Apia, the port and mart, is the seat of the political sickness of
Samoa. At the foot of a peaked, woody mountain, the coast makes a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: young Alexander, and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of Colonel of
the Life Guards. And from thence he rose rapidly, till after his great
master's death he found himself despot of Egypt.
His face, as it appears on his coins, is of the loftiest and most Jove-
like type of Greek beauty. There is a possibility about it, as about
most old Greek faces, of boundless cunning; a lofty irony too, and a
contemptuousness, especially about the mouth, which puts one in mind of
Goethe's expression; the face, altogether, of one who knew men too well
to respect them. At least, he was a man of clear enough vision. He saw
what was needed in those strange times, and he went straight to the
thing which he saw. It was his wisdom which perceived that the huge
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: For, Annie, you see, her father was not the man to
save,
Had n't a head to manage, and drank himself into his
grave.
Pretty enough, very pretty! but I was against it for
one.
Eh!--but he would n't hear me--and Willy, you say,
is gone.
III.
Willy, my beauty, my eldest-born, the flower of the
flock;
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