| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: twenty of them.
Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so pretty
as she was. I was certainly not as handsome. But I was vital, and I was
new, and she was old--they all forsook her and followed me. They
worshipped me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had
twenty horses offered me when I could only ride one; it was for me they
waited at street corners; it was what I said and did that they talked of.
Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life; no one ever had told me
I was beautiful and a woman. I believed them. I did not know it was
simply a fashion, which one man had set and the rest followed
unreasoningly. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No. I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: it was because the cause of it had disappeared, and with this cause,
the combustible in which formerly consisted the riches of the Dochart pit.
Harry descended the first steps of the upper ladder.
Starr followed. They soon found themselves in a profound obscurity,
which was only relieved by the glimmer of the lamp.
The young man held it above his head, the better to light
his companion. A dozen ladders were descended by the engineer
and his guide, with the measured step habitual to the miner.
They were all still in good condition.
James Starr examined, as well as the insufficient light would permit,
the sides of the dark shaft, which were covered by a partly rotten
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade." A. Gratry:
Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89.
This primacy, in the faith-state, of vague expansive impulse over
direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman's lines (Leaves of
Grass, 1872, p. 190):--
"O to confront night, storms, hunger,ridicule, accidents,
rebuffs, as the trees and animals do. . . .
Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and
still urge you, without the least idea what is our
destination
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and
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