| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: Stain with his purple blood the waxen bell
That overweighs the jacinth, and to me
The wretched Cyprian her woe will tell,
And I will kiss her mouth and streaming eyes,
And lead her to the myrtle-hidden grove where Adon lies!
Cry out aloud on Itys! memory
That foster-brother of remorse and pain
Drops poison in mine ear, - O to be free,
To burn one's old ships! and to launch again
Into the white-plumed battle of the waves
And fight old Proteus for the spoil of coral-flowered caves!
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: harmony which is the ideal of a home; the majority are blemished with
some littleness or meanness, and meanness of any kind begets
bickering. One man is honorable and diligent, but hard and crabbed;
another kindly, but obstinate; this one loves his wife, yet his will
is arbitrary and uncertain; that other, preoccupied by ambition, pays
off his affections as he would a debt, bestows the luxuries of wealth
but deprives the daily life of happiness,--in short, the average man
of social life is essentially incomplete, without being signally to
blame. Men of talent are as variable as barometers; genius alone is
intrinsically good.
For this reason unalloyed happiness is found at the two extremes of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: For a farther vindication of this famous art, I have thought fit
to present the world with the following prophecy. The original is
said to be of the famous Merlin, who lived about a thousand years
ago; and the following translation is two hundred years old, for
it seems to be written near the end of Henry the Seventh's reign.
I found it in an old edition of Merlin's Prophecies, imprinted at
London by John Hawkins in the year 1530, page 39. I set it down
word for word in the old orthography, and shall take leave to
subjoin a few explanatory notes.
Seven and Ten addyd to Nyne,
Of Fraunce her Woe this is the Sygne,
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