| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler: them away]. I'd have you to know, Mary, if you
won't make young Van Dumpling the man of your
choice, you shall marry him as the man of my choice.
MARIA
You terrify me, Sir. Indeed, Sir, I am all submission.
My will is yours.
VAN ROUGH
Why, that is the way your mother us'd to talk.
"My will is yours, my dear Mr. Van Rough, my will
is yours"; but she took special care to have her
own way, though, for all that.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: "The peace with God." "The sense of sins forgiven." Methodists and
revivalists say the words, and the mocking world shoots out its lip, and
walks by smiling--"Hypocrite."
There are more fools and fewer hypocrites than the wise world dreams of.
The hypocrite is rare as icebergs in the tropics; the fool common as
buttercups beside a water-furrow: whether you go this way or that you
tread on him; you dare not look at your own reflection in the water but you
see one. There is no cant phrase, rotten with age, but it was the dress of
a living body; none but at heart it signifies a real bodily or mental
condition which some have passed through.
After hours and nights of frenzied fear of the supernatural desire to
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