| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades have their
reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we left
Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.
The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new
drainage works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first
acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do
with that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at
first did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy
might walk dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon
that came the pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's
meadows, being no longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: with another dig Mr. Deedy.
Unregenerate as I was I could read the queer implications of this
speech. The present owner's superior virtue as well as his deeper
craft spoke in his reference to the late editor as one of that
baser sort who deal in false representations. Mr. Deedy would as
soon have sent me to call on Neil Paraday as he would have
published a "holiday-number"; but such scruples presented
themselves as mere ignoble thrift to his successor, whose own
sincerity took the form of ringing door-bells and whose definition
of genius was the art of finding people at home. It was as if Mr.
Deedy had published reports without his young men's having, as
|
