| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: mortality, and any dead farmer was seized upon to be a
text. The classical examples of this art are in
Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly
monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by
contemporaries; and now, when the elegance is not so
apparent, the significance remains. You may perhaps look
with a smile on the profusion of Latin mottoes - some
crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing
on a scroll from angels' trumpets - on the emblematic
horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and
all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Treasure Island |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: her a widow or wife, silly or wise, virtuous or the reverse, rich or
pour, soulless or full of feeling, handsome or plain,--in short, there
were as many Madame Firmianis as there are species in society, or
sects in Catholicism. Frightful reflection! we are all like
lithographic blocks, from which an indefinite number of copies can be
drawn by criticism,--the proofs being more or less like us according
to a distribution of shading which is so nearly imperceptible that our
reputation depends (barring the calumnies of friends and the
witticisms of newspapers) on the balance struck by our criticisers
between Truth that limps and Falsehood to which Parisian wit gives
wings.
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