| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare: He is too good and fair for death and me;
Whom I myself embrace to set him free.'
COUNTESS.
Ah, what sharp stings are in her mildest words!--
Rinaldo, you did never lack advice so much
As letting her pass so; had I spoke with her,
I could have well diverted her intents,
Which thus she hath prevented.
STEWARD.
Pardon me, madam:
If I had given you this at over-night,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: an irrevocable decree, the girl steeled herself to hear. But the man paused,
gazing straight out before him. She felt his hand relax in hers, and she
pressed it sympathetically, encouragingly. But she felt the rigidity going out
of his tensed body, and she knew that spirit and flesh were relaxing together.
His resolution was ebbing. He would not speak--she knew it; and she knew,
likewise, with the sureness of faith, that it was because he could not.
She gazed despairingly before her, a numb feeling at her heart, as though hope
and happiness had died. She watched the sun flickering down through the
warm-trunked redwoods. But she watched in a mechanical, absent way. She looked
at the scene as from a long way off, without interest, herself an alien, no
longer an intimate part of the earth and trees and flowers she loved so well.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Agesilaus by Xenophon: the laws at home.
[12] Reading, {tous ek ton polemion nekrous}, after Weiske.
It was after this[13] that his attention was drawn to the men of
Argos. They had appropriated Corinth, and were reaping the fruits of
their fields at home. The war to them was a merry jest. Accordingly he
marched against them; and having ravaged their territory throughout,
he crossed over by the pass[14] down upon Corinth and captured the
long walls leading to Lechaeum. And so having thrown open the gates of
Peloponnese he returned home in time for the Hyacinthia,[15] where, in
the post assigned to him by the master of the chorus, he shared in the
performance of the paean in honour of the god.
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