| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: and frolic carried rather too far; perhaps we may see in it the
/outrances/ of another age, the Eighteenth Century pushed to extremes;
it harks back to the Musketeers; it is an exploit stolen from
Champcenetz; nay, such light-hearted inconstancy takes us back to the
festooned and ornate period of the old court of the Valois. In an age
as moral as the present, we are bound to regard audacity of this kind
sternly; still, at the same time that 'cornet of sugar-plums' may
serve to warn young girls of the perils of lingering where fancies,
more charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy
flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of
equivocal effervescence, into too palpitating issues. The anecdote
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: STILL I love to rhyme, and still more, rhyming, to wander
Far from the commoner way;
Old-time trills and falls by the brook-side still do I ponder,
Dreaming to-morrow to-day.
Come here, come, revive me, Sun-God, teach me, Apollo,
Measures descanted before;
Since I ancient verses, I emulous follow,
Prints in the marbles of yore.
Still strange, strange, they sound in old-young raiment invested,
Songs for the brain to forget -
Young song-birds elate to grave old temples benested
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: Prime Minister of England, that "in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine,
the United States must insist on arbitration"--that is, of the disputed
boundary. It was an abrupt extension of the Monroe Doctrine. It was
dictating to England the manner in which she should settle a difference
with another country. Salisbury declined. On December 17th Cleveland
announced to England that the Monroe Doctrine applied to every stage of
our national Life, and that as Great Britain had for many years refused
to submit the dispute to impartial arbitration, nothing remained to us
but to accept the situation. Moreover, if the disputed territory was
found to belong to Venezuela, it would be the duty of the United States
to resist, by every means in its power, the aggressions of Great Britain.
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