| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter Scott and Ruskin,
a dead language.
Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are
accessible to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and
to the arts of the stage. Every device of art should be brought to
bear on the young; so that they may discover some form of it that
delights them naturally; for there will come to all of them that
period between dawning adolescence and full maturity when the
pleasures and emotions of art will have to satisfy cravings which, if
starved or insulted, may become morbid and seek disgraceful
satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified otherwise than
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: answer, 'some plaguy ill-looking characters among them.'
'When you warmed,' said the secretary, looking sharply at the
other's downcast eyes, which brightened slowly as he spoke; 'when
you warmed into that noble outbreak; when you told them that you
were never of the lukewarm or the timid tribe, and bade them take
heed that they were prepared to follow one who would lead them on,
though to the very death; when you spoke of a hundred and twenty
thousand men across the Scottish border who would take their own
redress at any time, if it were not conceded; when you cried
"Perish the Pope and all his base adherents; the penal laws against
them shall never be repealed while Englishmen have hearts and
 Barnaby Rudge |