| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: Here is Mount Clear, Mount Rusty-Nail,
Mount Eagle and Mount High;--
The mice that in these mountains dwell,
No happier are than I!
Oh, what a joy to clamber there,
Oh, what a place for play,
With the sweet, the dim, the dusty air,
The happy hills of hay!
XL
Farewell to the Farm
The coach is at the door at last;
 A Child's Garden of Verses |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: him," he inquired, "not to accept the holy truce, on the ground that
the Argives made the season for it[3] depend not on a fixed date, but
on the prospect of a Lacedaemonian invasion?" The god indicated to the
inquirer that he might lawfully repudiate any holy truce which was
fraudulently antedated.[4] Not content with this, the young king, on
leaving Olympia, went at once to Delphi, and at that shrine put the
same question to Apollo: "Were his views in accordance with his
Father's as touching the holy truce?"--to which the son of Zeus made
answer: "Yea, altogether in accordance."[5]
[2] Or, "It was agreed by the Lacedaemonians."
[3] I.e. "the season of the Carneia."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!"
I felt myself crimson and I covered my face with my hands.
After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on
volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred--
I can call them nothing else--the strange, dizzy lift or swim
(I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had
nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we
might be engaged in making and that I could hear through any deepened
exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano.
Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there.
Though they were not angels, they "passed," as the French say,
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