| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: That blest one will be safe from ev'ry ill,
Who takes this gift with soul of purity,--"
The veil of Minstrelsy from Truth's own hand,
Of sunlight and of morn's sweet fragrance plann'd.
"And when thou and thy friends at fierce noon-day
Are parched with heat, straight cast it in the air!
Then Zephyr's cooling breath will round you play,
Distilling balm and flowers' sweet incense there;
The tones of earthly woe will die away,
The grave become a bed of clouds so fair,
To sing to rest life's billows will be seen,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: admitted, and conquered the supposition of this rivalry. She compared
herself with Pierrette; she was forty-two years old, with gray hair;
Pierrette was delicately fair, with eyes soft enough to warm a
withered heart. She had heard it said that men of fifty were apt to
love young girls of just that kind. Before the colonel had come
regularly to the house Sylvie had heard in the Tiphaines' salon
strange stories of his life and morals. Old maids preserve in their
love-affairs the exaggerated Platonic sentiments which young girls of
twenty are wont to profess; they hold to these fixed doctrines like
all who have little experience of life and no personal knowledge of
how great social forces modify, impair, and bring to nought such grand
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: there was, between the chimney and the partition, a wretched
sideboard of painted wood, pretending to be mahogany, of all
woods the most impossible to imitate. But the slippery red
quarries, the shabby little rugs in front of the chairs, and all
the furniture, shone with the hard rubbing cleanliness which
lends a treacherous lustre to old things by making their defects,
their age, and their long service still more conspicuous. An
indescribable odor pervaded the room, a mingled smell of the
exhalations from the lumber room, and the vapors of the dining-
room, with those from the stairs, though the window was partly
open. The air from the street fluttered the dusty curtains, which
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