| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: boat two sisters, bidding farewell (in humble imitation of Damien)
to the lights and joys of human life. One of these wept silently;
I could not withhold myself from joining her. Had you been there,
it is my belief that nature would have triumphed even in you; and
as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you beheld the stairs
crowded with abominable deformations of our common manhood, and saw
yourself landing in the midst of such a population as only now and
then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare - what a haggard eye
you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the
house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every
fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: different place it was when this youth of mine (at least on roll
days) would be present on the benches, and, at the near end of the
platform, Lindsay senior (3) was airing his robust old age. It is
possible my successors may have never even heard of Old Lindsay;
but when he went, a link snapped with the last century. He had
something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and plain; he spoke
with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire; his
reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with
post-chaises - a Scotland before steam; he had seen the coal fire
on the Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own
grandfather. Thus he was for me a mirror of things perished; it
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler; for when the lawyer is
swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or
contriving plots, then we sit on cowslip-banks, hear the birds sing, and
possess ourselves in as much quietness as these silent silver streams,
which we now see glide so quietly by us. Indeed, my good scholar, we
may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, " Doubtless God
could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did "; and so,
if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent
recreation than angling.
I'll tell you, scholar; when I sat last on this primrose-bank, and looked
down these meadows, I thought of them as Charles the emperor did of
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