| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces;
but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both
could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because
of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose
that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued
through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due
Second Inaugural Address |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: purple from the "poor, bare, forked animal" that calls itself a king
and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of
the mysterious restraint that kept "Eliza and our James" from teaching
Shakespear to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why
Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers
went to the galleys or Siberia. From the mature Shakespear we get no
such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage country
gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the
shepherd in As You Like It, and many honest, brave, human, and loyal
servants, beside the inevitable comic ones. Even in the Jingo play,
Henry V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close
the heavy wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the
room was sticky and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart,
confined to the house, grew irritable.
Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender
tenure she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither
speech nor thought. And the little Marie's love for Stewart,
grown to be a part of her, was largely maternal. She held him by
mothering him, by keeping him comfortable, not by a great
reciprocal passion that might in time have brought him to her in
chains.
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