| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: heads: and when Tom told them of the fire, they held an
indignation meeting forthwith, and unanimously determined to hang
Tom's dog for coming into their country with gunpowder in his
mouth. Tom couldn't help saying that though they did fancy they
had carried all the wit away with them out of Lincolnshire two
hundred years ago, yet if they had had one such Lincolnshire
nobleman among them as good old Lord Yarborough, he would have
called for the fire-engines before he hanged other people's dogs.
But it was of no use, and the dog was hanged: and Tom couldn't
even have his carcase; for they had abolished the have-his-carcase
act in that country, for fear lest when rogues fell out, honest men
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: seems to have been believed in the family that the whole
matter had been originally made up between these two, with no
very spontaneous inclination on the part of the bride. (1)
Knox's idea of marriage, as I have said, was not the same for
all men; but on the whole, it was not lofty. We have a
curious letter of his, written at the request of Queen Mary,
to the Earl of Argyle, on very delicate household matters;
which, as he tells us, "was not well accepted of the said
Earl." (2) We may suppose, however, that his own home was
regulated in a similar spirit. I can fancy that for such a
man, emotional, and with a need, now and again, to exercise
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: ingenious caprice; she loved too well to calculate for the future, and
never imagined that so exquisite a life could come to an end. Happy in
being her husband's sole delight, she believed that her
inextinguishable love would always be her greatest grace in his eyes,
as her devotion and obedience would be a perennial charm. And, indeed,
the ecstasy of love had made her so brilliantly lovely that her beauty
filled her with pride, and gave her confidence that she could always
reign over a man so easy to kindle as Monsieur de Sommervieux. Thus
her position as a wife brought her no knowledge but the lessons of
love.
In the midst of her happiness, she was still the simple child who had
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