| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: Gettysburg should have been the place where President Lincoln
made his most beautiful and famous address. After the battle the
dead and wounded of both the Union and Confederate armies had
received tender attention there. Later it was decided to set
aside a portion of the battlefield for a great national military
cemetery in which the dead found orderly burial. It was dedicated
to its sacred use on November 19, 1863. At the end of the stately
ceremonies President Lincoln rose and said:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to
the proposition that all men are created equal.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: fact being that the good man was simply worn out by the effort to
complete his mysterious picture. He was seated languidly in a large
oaken chair of vast dimensions covered with black leather; and without
changing his melancholy attitude he cast on Porbus the distant glance
of a man sunk in absolute dejection.
"Well, maitre," said Porbus, "was the distant ultra-marine, for which
you journeyed to Brussels, worthless? Are you unable to grind a new
white? Is the oil bad, or the brushes restive?"
"Alas!" cried the old man, "I thought for one moment that my work was
accomplished; but I must have deceived myself in some of the details.
I shall have no peace until I clear up my doubts. I am about to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey: start the drive at dawn."
The sun went down under a crimson veil; a dull glow spread, fan-shaped,
upward; twilight faded to darkness with the going down of the wind.
August Naab paced to and fro before his tired and thirsty flock.
"I'd like to know," said Hare to Dave, "why those men filled up this
waterhole."
"Holderness wants to cut us off from Silver Cup Spring, and this was a
half-way waterhole. Probably he didn't know we had the sheep upland, but
he wouldn't have cared. He's set himself to get our cattle range and
he'll stop at nothing. Prospects look black for us. Father never gives
up. He doesn't believe yet that we can lose our water. He prays and
The Heritage of the Desert |
