| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible,
and happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from
his chair? Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on
his brow? Will he begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon,
and blessed, and given to mankind,--will he begin it with better
purposes than the many that have been spent amiss? Or are all the
deep-laid schemes of yesterday as stubborn in his heart, and as
House of Seven Gables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: the better; he has already told us in the course of his exhibition many
things of various kinds about Homer and divers other poets.
EUDICUS: I am sure that Hippias will be delighted to answer anything which
you would like to ask; tell me, Hippias, if Socrates asks you a question,
will you answer him?
HIPPIAS: Indeed, Eudicus, I should be strangely inconsistent if I refused
to answer Socrates, when at each Olympic festival, as I went up from my
house at Elis to the temple of Olympia, where all the Hellenes were
assembled, I continually professed my willingness to perform any of the
exhibitions which I had prepared, and to answer any questions which any one
had to ask.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: Of your sheltering mother-mine,
Leap and sparkle, dance and shine,
Blithely and securely set
In love's magic coronet.
Living jewel, may you be
Laughter-bound and sorrow-free.
THE PARDAH NASHIN
Her life is a revolving dream
Of languid and sequestered ease;
Her girdles and her fillets gleam
Like changing fires on sunset seas;
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