| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: have shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.
But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his
liking for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all
flowers together. They were but garnishings, childish toys,
trifling ornaments for ladies' chimney-shelves. It was towards his
cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His
preference for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were
found invading the flower-pots, and an outpost of savoys was once
discovered in the centre of the lawn. He would prelect over some
thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on
reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens. Yet even
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: Mr. Hume might have envied and admired afar off, to make him do his
work gratis, by giving him the nuisances as his perquisites, and
teaching him how to eat them. Certainly (without going the length
of the Caribs, who upheld cannibalism because, they said, it made
war cheap, and precluded entirely the need of a commissariat), this
cardinal virtue of cheapness ought to make Squinado an interesting
object in the eyes of the present generation; especially as he was
at that moment a true sanitary martyr, having, like many of his
human fellow-workers, got into a fearful scrape by meddling with
those existing interests, and "vested rights which are but vested
wrongs," which have proved fatal already to more than one Board of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso: For there described was the worthy race
And pedigree of all of the house of Est:
Come from a Roman spring o'er all the place
Flowed pure streams of crystals east and west,
With laurel crowned stood the princes old,
Their wars the hermit and their battles told.
LXVII
He showed them Caius first, when first in prey
To people strange the falling empire went,
First Prince of Est, that did the sceptre sway
O'er such as chose him lord by tree consent;
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