| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The narrow thoroughfares, the crooked lanes!
Rise, too, ye shapes and shadows of the Past,
Rise from your long-forgotten graves at last;
Let us behold your faces, let us hear
The words ye uttered in those days of fear
Revisit your familiar haunts again,--
The scenes of triumph, and the scenes of pain
And leave the footprints of your bleeding feet
Once more upon the pavement of the street!
Nor let the Historian blame the Poet here,
If he perchance misdate the day or year,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: do us any good; for I have an impression that temperance is a benefit and a
good. And therefore, O son of Callaeschrus, as you maintain that
temperance or wisdom is a science of science, and also of the absence of
science, I will request you to show in the first place, as I was saying
before, the possibility, and in the second place, the advantage, of such a
science; and then perhaps you may satisfy me that you are right in your
view of temperance.
Critias heard me say this, and saw that I was in a difficulty; and as one
person when another yawns in his presence catches the infection of yawning
from him, so did he seem to be driven into a difficulty by my difficulty.
But as he had a reputation to maintain, he was ashamed to admit before the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: men who have the very characteristics from which he infers that
Shakespear was at a social disadvantage through his lack of
middle-class training. They are rowdy, ill-mannered, abusive,
mischievous, fond of quoting obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in
that sort of blackmail which consists in mercilessly libelling and
insulting every writer whose opinions are sufficiently heterodox to
make it almost impossible for him to risk perhaps five years of a
slender income by an appeal to a prejudiced orthodox jury; and they
see nothing in all this cruel blackguardism but an uproariously jolly
rag, although they are by no means without genuine literary ability, a
love of letters, and even some artistic conscience. But he will find
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