| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: his debt in a fragment of autobiography, but erected a
tomb over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This was
worthy of an artist, but it was done in vain; and
although I think I have read nearly all the biographies
of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of
nature was not violated, or where Fergusson was not
sacrificed to the credit of his follower's originality.
There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll
Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to
gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author
without disparaging all others. They are indeed mistaken
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: went on to assert that only the horror of that image, looming out
at herself, could be the reason of her avoiding the person who so
forced it home. The fact he had encountered made everything
hideously vivid, and more vivid than anything else that just such
another pair of goggles was what would have been prescribed to
Flora.
"I see--I see," I presently returned. "What would become of Lord
Iffield if she were suddenly to come out in them? What indeed
would become of every one, what would become of everything?" This
was an enquiry that Dawling was evidently unprepared to meet, and I
completed it by saying at last: "My dear fellow, for that matter,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: snow-covered flat, he predicated first the gold-strike that made
the city possible, and next he had an eye for steamboat landings,
sawmill and warehouse locations, and all the needs of a
far-northern mining city. But this, in turn, was the mere
setting for something bigger, namely, the play of temperament.
Opportunities swarmed in the streets and buildings and human and
economic relations of the city of his dream. It was a larger
table for gambling. The limit was the sky, with the Southland on
one side and the aurora borealis on the other. The play would be
big, bigger than any Yukoner had ever imagined, and he, Burning
Daylight, would see that he got in on that play.
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