| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: There was only one young girl there when I came. She was about seventeen,
fair, and rather fully-fleshed; she had large dreamy blue eyes, and wavy
light hair; full, rather heavy lips, until she smiled; then her face broke
into dimples, and all her white teeth shone. The hotel-keeper may have had
a daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts had two, but we never saw them.
She reigned alone. All the men worshipped her. She was the only woman
they had to think of. They talked of her on the stoep, at the market, at
the hotel; they watched for her at street corners; they hated the man she
bowed to or walked with down the street. They brought flowers to the front
door; they offered her their horses; they begged her to marry them when
they dared. Partly, there was something noble and heroic in this devotion
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: And when he was home, there lay his uncle smitten on the head, and
his father pierced through the heart, and his mother cloven through
the midst. And he sat in the lone house and wept beside the
bodies.
MORAL.
Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
And like the mandrake comes with groans.
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