| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: call'd the Prophets; occasion'd chiefly by seeing the time come
that many of their prophecies should be fulfill'd, and then
finding themselves deceiv'd by contrary events. It is indeed to
be admir'd how any deceiver can be so weak, to foretel things
near at hand, when a very few months must of necessity discover
the impostor to all the world; in this point less prudent than
common almanack-makers, who are so wise to wonder in generals,
and talk dubiously, and leave to the reader the business of
interpreting.
On the 1st of this month a French general will be killed by a
random shot of a cannon-ball.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: cardinal.
The chancellor and the cardinal looked at each other, without
venturing to further communicate their thoughts; but Robertet
expressed them, for he thought it necessary to show more devotion to
the Guises than these great personages, inasmuch as he was smaller
than they.
"It is a great misfortune that the house of Navarre, instead of
abjuring the religion of its fathers, does not abjure the spirit of
vengeance and rebellion which the Connetable de Bourbon breathed into
it," he said aloud. "We shall see the quarrels of the Armagnacs and
the Bourguignons revive in our day."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: flows Acheron, which passes under the earth through desert places into the
Acherusian lake: this is the lake to the shores of which the souls of the
many go when they are dead, and after waiting an appointed time, which is
to some a longer and to some a shorter time, they are sent back to be born
again as animals. The third river passes out between the two, and near the
place of outlet pours into a vast region of fire, and forms a lake larger
than the Mediterranean Sea, boiling with water and mud; and proceeding
muddy and turbid, and winding about the earth, comes, among other places,
to the extremities of the Acherusian Lake, but mingles not with the waters
of the lake, and after making many coils about the earth plunges into
Tartarus at a deeper level. This is that Pyriphlegethon, as the stream is
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