| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: that I judged him, as the rest had done, with a disdainful pity; his
gesture expressed the whole philosophy of despair.
Perhaps his story had taken him back to happy days and to Venice. He
caught up his clarionet and made plaintive music, playing a Venetian
boat-song with something of his lost skill, the skill of the young
patrician lover. It was a sort of /Super flumina Babylonis/. Tears
filled my eyes. Any belated persons walking along the Boulevard
Bourdon must have stood still to listen to an exile's last prayer, a
last cry of regret for a lost name, mingled with memories of Bianca.
But gold soon gained the upper hand, the fatal passion quenched the
light of youth.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: of your own. The man from Honolulu - miserable, leering creature -
communicated the tale to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a
public-house, where (I will so far agree with your temperance
opinions) man is not always at his noblest; and the man from
Honolulu had himself been drinking - drinking, we may charitably
fancy, to excess. It was to your "Dear Brother, the Reverend H. B.
Gage," that you chose to communicate the sickening story; and the
blue ribbon which adorns your portly bosom forbids me to allow you
the extenuating plea that you were drunk when it was done. Your
"dear brother" - a brother indeed - made haste to deliver up your
letter (as a means of grace, perhaps) to the religious papers;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: is;" a statement with an irreligious smack at the first
sight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on
a second. He will give effect to his own character without
apology; he sees "that the elementary laws never apologise."
"I reckon," he adds, with quaint colloquial arrogance, "I
reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house
by, after all." The level follows the law of its being; so,
unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in
his own place and way; God is the maker of all and all are in
one design. For he believes in God, and that with a sort of
blasphemous security. "No array of terms," quoth he, "no
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