| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: discouragement at the Confederate capital had become. Mr. Blair
was the father of Lincoln's first Postmaster-General, a man of
large acquaintance in the South, who knew perhaps better than
anyone in Washington the character and temper of the southern
leaders. He had gone to Richmond hoping to do something toward
bringing the war to a close, but without explaining his plans to
anyone, and with no authority from the government, beyond
permission to pass through the military lines and return. His
scheme was utterly impracticable, and Mr. Lincoln was interested
in the report of his visit only because it showed that the
rebellion was nearing its end. This was so marked that he sent
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: Let us admit a truth! One must be a queen to know how to abdicate, and
to descend with dignity from a lofty position which is never wholly
lost. Those only who have an inner consciousness of being nothing in
themselves, show regrets in falling, or struggle, murmuring, to return
to a past which can never return,--a fact of which they themselves are
well aware. Compelled to do without the choice exotics in the midst of
which she had lived, and which set off so charmingly her whole being
(for it is impossible not to compare her to a flower), the princess
had wisely chosen a ground-floor apartment; there she enjoyed a pretty
little garden which belonged to it,--a garden full of shrubs, and an
always verdant turf, which brightened her peaceful retreat. She had
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: because I wearied her?" and then, "It is the way with all women."
But this power of generalizing which gives men so much the superiority
in mistake over the dumb animals, was immediately thwarted by Lydgate's
memory of wondering impressions from the behavior of another woman--
from Dorothea's looks and tones of emotion about her husband
when Lydgate began to attend him--from her passionate cry to be
taught what would best comfort that man for whose sake it seemed
as if she must quell every impulse in her except the yearnings
of faithfulness and compassion. These revived impressions succeeded
each other quickly and dreamily in Lydgate's mind while the tea
was being brewed. He had shut his eyes in the last instant of
Middlemarch |
