| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public
concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace
of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young
woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one
who looked young through successful indifference with her precious
reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could
enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a
rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a
sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of
knowledge, "their" knowledge (this discriminating possessive was
always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our
play about the devil, in our Satanellas,--Roberts,--Fausts; chanting
hymns through traceried windows for background effect, and
artistically modulating the "Dio" through variation on variation of
mimicked prayer: (while we distribute tracts, next day, for the
benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose to be the
signification of the Third Commandment;-) this gas-lighted, and gas-
inspired Christianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back the hem
of our robes from the touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to
do a piece of common Christian righteousness in a plain English word
or deed; to make Christian law any rule of life, and found one
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good spot to repair
your tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, after all, that
there was something just in these appreciations. The invalid is now
asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air shall medicine him; the
demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den.
For even Winter has his 'dear domestic cave,' and in those places
where he may be said to dwell for ever tempers his austerities.
Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived,
after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal
moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone, the
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