| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: clearly the way things must go. And then even it was not too late.
I might have gone back, I think, and saved the world. The people
of the north would follow me, I knew, granted only that in one
thing I respected their moral standards. The east and south would
trust me as they would trust no other northern man. And I knew
I had only to put it to her and she would have let me go . . . .
Not because she did not love me!
"Only I did not want to go; my will was all the other way
about. I had so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I
was still so fresh a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness
of what I ought to do had no power at all to touch my will. My
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: imprisonment, have been beyond power and description; one who has
really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden
of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and
all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what
she is - partly an ideal and partly an influence: a suggestion of
what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a
soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual
seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea: one for whom
beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have the same message. On
the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said
to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: popular antiquities. He is the countryman of David Ritchie, and
had the best access to collect anecdotes of him.
"His skull," says this authority, "which was of an oblong and
rather unusual shape, was said to be of such strength, that he
could strike it with ease through the panel of a door, or the end
of a barrel. His laugh is said to have been quite horrible; and
his screech-owl voice, shrill, uncouth, and dissonant,
corresponded well with his other peculiarities.
"There was nothing very uncommon about his dress. He usually
wore an old slouched hat when he went abroad; and when at home, a
sort of cowl or night-cap. He never wore shoes, being unable to
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