| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.
XLIII - TO S. R. CROCKETT (On receiving a Dedication)
BLOWS the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!
Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,
And winds, austere and pure:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: buried in neglect and obscurity! What wealth, and what poverty!
Soldiers, better than other men, can appreciate the element of
grandeur to be found in heroism in sabots, in the Evangel clad in
rags. The Book may be found elsewhere, adorned, embellished, tricked
out in silk and satin and brocade, but here, of a surety, dwelt the
spirit of the Book. It was impossible to doubt that Heaven had some
holy purpose underlying it all, at the sight of the woman who had
taken a mother's lot upon herself, as Jesus Christ had taken the form
of a man, who gleaned and suffered and ran into debt for her little
waifs; a woman who defrauded herself in her reckonings, and would not
own that she was ruining herself that she might be a Mother. One was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: Shall I not find your turrets toward the north,
Where you defied white winter armed for war;
Your southern casements where the sun blows in
Between the leaf-bent boughs the wind has lifted?
Shall we not see the sunrise toward the east,
Watch dawn by dawn the rose of day unfolding
Its golden-hearted beauty sovereignly;
And toward the west look quietly at evening?
Shall I not see all these and all your treasures?
In carven coffers hidden in the dark
Have you not laid a sapphire lit with flame
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