| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: only to call me bad names--I will agree to anything you choose;
I will admit that I am the biggest snob in Paris." Newman, in fact,
had declined an invitation personally given by the Princess Borealska,
an inquiring Polish lady to whom he had been presented, on the ground
that on that particular day he always dined at Mrs. Tristram's;
and it was only a tenderly perverse theory of his hostess of
the Avenue d'Iena that he was faithless to his early friendships.
She needed the theory to explain a certain moral irritation
by which she was often visited; though, if this explanation
was unsound, a deeper analyst than I must give the right one.
Having launched our hero upon the current which was bearing him
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: he filled his forest primeval with "murmuring pines and hemlocks."
The higher one climbs, the darker and gloomier and more rugged the
vegetation becomes. The pine-trees soon cease to follow you; the
hemlocks disappear, and the balsams can go no farther. Only the
hardy spruce keeps on bravely, rough and stunted, with branches
matted together and pressed down flat by the weight of the winter's
snow, until finally, somewhere about the level of four thousand
feet above the sea, even this bold climber gives out, and the
weather-beaten rocks of the summit are clad only with mosses and
Alpine plants.
Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with men, a mark of superior
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: We speak of a lover possessing the person of his mistress. We speak
of offences against the person as opposed to insults, libels, or
offences against property. And the gods of primitive men and the
earlier civilisations were quite of that quality of person. They
were thought of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting
consistently. If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was
because they were aloof or because their "persons" were too splendid
for weak human eyes. Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the
person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted
upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was
utterly consumed. The early Islamic conception of God, like the
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