| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: Ere I my lamp did light,
Nor while I crossed the ferry feared,
Or wind or rain or night.
The child's eyes sparkled as he turned to some of those
illustrating children at play, and as he constructed one which
represents two children swinging their arms and running,
he repeated:
See the children at their
play,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: the cage to vanish I should stand there motionless, his helpless
prey. I knew that were he at large in the same building with me I
should be too terror-stricken to escape him. At the foot of a
ladder leading clear to escape I should have awaited him paralyzed.
At last I gripped my nurse's hand. ‘Take me away,' I whispered.
"In my dreams that night he stalked me. I made my frozen flight
from him, I slammed a door on him, and he thrust his paw through a
panel as though it had been paper and clawed for me. The paw got
longer and longer. . . .
"I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.
"I remember that he took me in his arms.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: war, or in any sort of contest; but to whom the suffering or not suffering
of these things will be for the best, can no more be decided by the
soothsayer than by one who is no soothsayer.
LACHES: I cannot understand what Nicias would be at, Socrates; for he
represents the courageous man as neither a soothsayer, nor a physician, nor
in any other character, unless he means to say that he is a god. My
opinion is that he does not like honestly to confess that he is talking
nonsense, but that he shuffles up and down in order to conceal the
difficulty into which he has got himself. You and I, Socrates, might have
practised a similar shuffle just now, if we had only wanted to avoid the
appearance of inconsistency. And if we had been arguing in a court of law
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