| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds, methought, would open and shew riches
Ready to drop on me: that when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.
which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her
ears which Cloten dreaded: she may not have seen the beauty of it,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: in a chink of the closed shutters. The place was impressive
but it looked cold and cautious. Mrs. Prest had floated away,
giving me a rendezvous at the end of half an hour by some
neighboring water steps; and I had been let into the house,
after pulling the rusty bell wire, by a little red-headed,
white-faced maidservant, who was very young and not ugly and
wore clicking pattens and a shawl in the fashion of a hood.
She had not contented herself with opening the door from above
by the usual arrangement of a creaking pulley, though she
had looked down at me first from an upper window, dropping the
inevitable challenge which in Italy precedes the hospitable act.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: Intellectual History of Louis Lambert.
On an evening in the month of November, 1793, the principal persons of
Carentan were assembled in the salon of Madame de Dey, where they met
daily. Several circumstances which would never have attracted
attention in a large town, though they greatly preoccupied the little
one, gave to this habitual rendezvous an unusual interest. For the two
preceding evenings Madame de Dey had closed her doors to the little
company, on the ground that she was ill. Such an event would, in
ordinary times, have produced as much effect as the closing of the
theatres in Paris; life under those circumstances seems merely
incomplete. But in 1793, Madame de Dey's action was likely to have
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