| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: That lit my lover's funeral pyre:
Alas! alas! my lord is dead.
VILLAGE-SONG
Honey, child, honey, child, whither are you
going?
Would you cast your jewels all to the breezes
blowing?
Would you leave the mother who on golden
grain has fed you?
Would you grieve the lover who is riding forth
to wed you?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: he who possessed the art could not meet with any harm at the hands of a
single person, or perhaps of several; and in any case he would have a great
advantage. Further, this sort of skill inclines a man to the love of other
noble lessons; for every man who has learned how to fight in armour will
desire to learn the proper arrangement of an army, which is the sequel of
the lesson: and when he has learned this, and his ambition is once fired,
he will go on to learn the complete art of the general. There is no
difficulty in seeing that the knowledge and practice of other military arts
will be honourable and valuable to a man; and this lesson may be the
beginning of them. Let me add a further advantage, which is by no means a
slight one,--that this science will make any man a great deal more valiant
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: one another in France since the Charter. A woman with principles could
not have fallen into better hands. It is certainly a great thing for a
virtuous woman to have married a man incapable of follies.
Occasionally some fops have been sufficiently impertinent to press the
hand of the marquise while dancing with her. They gained nothing in
return but contemptuous glances; all were made to feel the shock of
that insulting indifference which, like a spring frost, destroys the
germs of flattering hopes. Beaux, wits, and fops, men whose sentiments
are fed by sucking their canes, those of a great name, or a great
fame, those of the highest or the lowest rank in her own world, they
all blanch before her. She has conquered the right to converse as long
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