| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: twigs hit him smartly in the face....
He was between a tree-stem and the saddle, with his leg over the
steering lever and, so far as he could realise, not hurt. He
tried to alter his position and free his leg, and found himself
slipping and dropping through branches with everything giving way
beneath him. He clutched and found himself in the lower branches
of a tree beneath the flying-machine. The air was full of a
pleasant resinous smell. He stared for a moment motionless, and
then very carefully clambered down branch by branch to the soft
needle-covered ground below.
"Good business," he said, looking up at the bent and tilted
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: ambiguous 'they,' 'their,' etc.; for fear of spoiling the effect of the
sentence by introducing 'it.' Collective nouns in Greek and English create
a similar but lesser awkwardness.
(4) To use of relation is far more extended in Greek than in English.
Partly the greater variety of genders and cases makes the connexion of
relative and antecedent less ambiguous: partly also the greater number of
demonstrative and relative pronouns, and the use of the article, make the
correlation of ideas simpler and more natural. The Greek appears to have
had an ear or intelligence for a long and complicated sentence which is
rarely to be found in modern nations; and in order to bring the Greek down
to the level of the modern, we must break up the long sentence into two or
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