The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: I beheld the westward marches
Of the unknown, crowded nations.
All the land was full of people,
Restless, struggling, toiling, striving,
Speaking many tongues, yet feeling
But one heart-beat in their bosoms.
In the woodlands rang their axes,
Smoked their towns in all the valleys,
Over all the lakes and rivers
Rushed their great canoes of thunder.
"Then a darker, drearier vision
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: None but a madman can refuse to see in the human body a fragment of
Matter; your natural sciences, when they decompose it, find little
difference between its elements and those of other animals. On the
other hand, the idea produced in man by the comparison of many objects
has never seemed to any one to belong to the domain of Matter. As to
this, I offer no opinion. I am now concerned with your doubts, not
with my certainties. To you, as to the majority of thinkers, the
relations between things, the reality of which is proved to you by
your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover, do not
seem Material. The Natural universe of things and beings ends, in man,
with the Spiritual universe of similarities or differences which he
 Seraphita |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: but saw this, he would sound the tocsin - we should all be
butchered.'
She measured the depth of her abasement steadily. 'Take whom you
must,' she said, 'and bring the litter here.'
Once she was alone she ran to the Baron, and with a sickening heart
sought to allay the flux of blood. The touch of the skin of that
great charlatan revolted her to the toes; the wound, in her ignorant
eyes, looked deathly; yet she contended with her shuddering, and,
with more skill at least than the Chancellor's, staunched the
welling injury. An eye unprejudiced with hate would have admired
the Baron in his swoon; he looked so great and shapely; it was so
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