| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: long moss wavering in the current. There is a rustic song of a
girl passing through the fields at sunset, that still repeats its
far-off cadence in your listening ears. There is a small flower
trembling on its stem in some hidden nook beneath the open sky,
that never withers through all the changing years; the wind passes
over it, but it is not gone--it abides forever in your soul, an
amaranthine blossom of beauty and truth.
White heather is not an easy flower to find. You may look for it
among the highlands for a day without success. And when it is
discovered, there is little outward charm to commend it. It lacks
the grace of the dainty bells that hang so abundantly from the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: dogmas of two adverse principles and of Pantheism were demolished at
his word, which proclaimed the Divine Unity, while ascribing to God
and His angels the knowledge, the ends to which the means shone
resplendent to the eyes of man. Fortified by the demonstrations that
proved the existence of the world of Matter, Doctor Sigier constructed
the scheme of a spiritual world dividing us from God by an ascending
scale of spheres, just as the plant is divided from man by an infinite
number of grades. He peopled the heavens, the stars, the planets, the
sun.
Quoting Saint Paul, he invested man with a new power; he might rise,
from globe to globe, to the very Fount of eternal life. Jacob's
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: thing it was the men were so near-hand to me, for I am about as clever
with the pistols as I am with the sword."
So then she drew from me the story of our battle in the brig, which I
had omitted in my first account of my affairs.
"Yes," said she, "you are brave. And your friend, I admire and love
him."
"Well, and I think anyone would!" said I. "He has his faults like
other folk; but he is brave and staunch and kind, God bless him! That
will be a strange day when I forget Alan." And the thought of him, and
that it was within my choice to speak with him that night, had almost
overcome me.
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