| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: and champaign but actually over the thoroughfares of a capital
city, which we could see blackened by day with the moving crowd of
the inhabitants, and at night shining with lamps. And lastly,
although I was not insensible to the restraints of prison or the
scantiness of our rations, I remembered I had sometimes eaten quite
as ill in Spain, and had to mount guard and march perhaps a dozen
leagues into the bargain. The first of my troubles, indeed, was
the costume we were obliged to wear. There is a horrible practice
in England to trick out in ridiculous uniforms, and as it were to
brand in mass, not only convicts but military prisoners, and even
the children in charity schools. I think some malignant genius had
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott: a faint, sweet voice; "I have no little bud to shelter now, and you
can enter here." It was the rose mother that spoke, and Thistle saw
how pale the bright leaves had grown, and how the slender stem was
bowed. Grieved, ashamed, and wondering at the flower's forgiving
words, he laid his weary head on the bosom he had filled with sorrow,
and the fragrant leaves were folded carefully about him.
But he could find no rest. The rose strove to comfort him; but when
she fancied he was sleeping, thoughts of her lost bud stole in, and
the little heart beat so sadly where he lay, that no sleep came; while
the bitter tears he had caused to flow fell more coldly on him than
the rain without. Then he heard the other flowers whispering among
Flower Fables |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: Cope.
I have also derived much assistance from the great work of Mr. Grote, which
contains excellent analyses of the Dialogues, and is rich in original
thoughts and observations. I agree with him in rejecting as futile the
attempt of Schleiermacher and others to arrange the Dialogues of Plato into
a harmonious whole. Any such arrangement appears to me not only to be
unsupported by evidence, but to involve an anachronism in the history of
philosophy. There is a common spirit in the writings of Plato, but not a
unity of design in the whole, nor perhaps a perfect unity in any single
Dialogue. The hypothesis of a general plan which is worked out in the
successive Dialogues is an after-thought of the critics who have attributed
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