| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: we naturally came to speak of the place. We discovered that we had
several mutual acquaintances there, and enjoyed talking over the
old times. Otherwise I did not take particularly to the man, and
as I came to know him better I noticed that he never mentioned that
part of his life which lay back of the years in Chicago. I asked a
casual question once or twice as to his home and family, but he
evaded me every time, and would not give a direct answer. He was
evidently a German by birth and education, a man with university
training, and one who knew life thoroughly. He had delightful
manners, and when he could forget his shyness for a while, he could
be very agreeable. The ladies of my family came to like him, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: And driven like autumn leaves before the wind.
HATHORNE.
You as a Minister of God, can meet them
With spiritual weapons: but, alas!
I, as a Magistrate, must combat them
With weapons from the armory of the flesh.
MATHER.
These wonders of the world invisible,--
These spectral shapes that haunt our habitations,--
The multiplied and manifold afflictions
With which the aged and the dying saints
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement
is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers.
All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespear's case,
prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered,
does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr Harris, the
deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper
contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on
Shakespear's apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that "perfect
ceremony" of love which consists in returning calls and making
protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions
which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy
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