| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ruling Passion by Henry van Dyke: the writer would fain have had done for him, and which I promised
myself faithfully to perform, as a test of an imagined friendship--
imagined not in the future, but in the impossible past.
I read the book in this spirit, searching its pages carefully,
through the long afternoon, in the solitary cabin of my boat. There
was nothing at first but an ordinary diary; a record of the work and
self-denials of a poor student of art. Then came the date of his
first visit to Larmone, and an expression of the pleasure of being
with his own people again after a lonely life, and some chronicle of
his occupations there, studies for pictures, and idle days that were
summed up in a phrase: "On the bay," or "In the woods."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: But my gladness was short-lived, for I was not yet out of the reach
and power of the slave-holders. I soon found that New York was not quite
so free or so safe a refuge as I had supposed, and a sense of loneliness
and insecurity again oppressed me most sadly. I chanced to meet on the street,
a few hours after my landing, a fugitive slave whom I had once known well
in slavery. The information received from him alarmed me. The fugitive
in question was known in Baltimore as "Allender's Jake," but in New York
he wore the more respectable name of "William Dixon." Jake, in law,
was the property of Doctor Allender, and Tolly Allender, the son
of the doctor, had once made an effort to recapture MR. DIXON,
but had failed for want of evidence to support his claim.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: the road without a backward glance, intent on an analysis of her
own feelings. With her mind made up to say no--and to the last
instant she had been so resolved--her lips nevertheless had said
yes. Or at least it seemed the lips. She had not intended to
consent. Then why had she? Her first surprise and bewilderment
at so wholly unpremeditated an act gave way to consternation as
she considered its consequences. She knew that Burning Daylight
was not a man to be trifled with, that under his simplicity and
boyishness he was essentially a dominant male creature, and that
she had pledged herself to a future of inevitable stress and
storm. And again she demanded of herself why she had said yes at
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