| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: The qualities of a great man are often federative. If among these
colossal spirits one has more talent than wit, his wit is still
superior to that of a man of whom it is simply stated that "he is
witty." Genius always presupposes moral insight. This insight may
be applied to a special subject; but he who can see a flower must
be able to see the sun. The man who on hearing a diplomate he has
saved ask, "How is the Emperor?" could say, "The courtier is
alive; the man will follow!"--that man is not merely a surgeon or
a physician, he is prodigiously witty also. Hence a patient and
diligent student of human nature will admit Desplein's exorbitant
pretensions, and believe--as he himself believed--that he might
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: for the South Seas, Herrick perhaps scarcely knew. Doubtless
there were fortunes to be made in pearl and copra; doubtless
others not more gifted than himself had climbed in the island
world to be queen's consorts and king's ministers. But if Herrick
had gone there with any manful purpose, he would have kept
his father's name; the alias betrayed his moral bankruptcy; he
bad struck his flag; he entertained no hope to reinstate himself
or help his straitened family; and he came to the islands (where
he knew the climate to be soft, bread cheap, and manners easy)
a skulker from life's battle and his own immediate duty. Failure,
he had said, was his portion; let it be a pleasant failure.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: sea weighing five ounces, and to come back next year weighing five
pounds, without having cost the soil or the state one farthing?
Or was it like a Scotch stream, such as Arthur Clough drew in his
"Bothie":-
"Where over a ledge of granite
Into a granite bason the amber torrent descended. . . . .
Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under;
Beautiful most of all, where beads of foam uprising
Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the
stillness. . . .
Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendant birch
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