| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: godsend.
All little towns are alike, save for a few local customs. When M. le
Baron Gaston de Nueil, the young Parisian in question, had spent two
or three evenings in his cousin's house, or with the friends who made
up Mme. de Sainte-Severe's circle, he very soon had made the
acquaintance of the persons whom this exclusive society considered to
be "the whole town." Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invariable
stock characters which every observer finds in every one of the many
capitals of the little States which made up the France of an older
day.
First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are regarded as
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: ancients themselves, namely, the Axiochus, De justo, De virtute, Demodocus,
Sisyphus, Eryxias, which on grounds, both of internal and external
evidence, we are able with equal certainty to reject. But there still
remains a small portion of which we are unable to affirm either that they
are genuine or spurious. They may have been written in youth, or possibly
like the works of some painters, may be partly or wholly the compositions
of pupils; or they may have been the writings of some contemporary
transferred by accident to the more celebrated name of Plato, or of some
Platonist in the next generation who aspired to imitate his master. Not
that on grounds either of language or philosophy we should lightly reject
them. Some difference of style, or inferiority of execution, or
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke: There was an air of calm and reserved opulence about
the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered,
but of wealth prudently applied. Standing on a corner of
the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon
the swelling tide of business with an expression of complacency
and half-disdain.
The house was not beautiful. There was nothing in its straight
front of
chocolate-colored stone, its heavy cornices, its broad, staring
windows of
plate glass, its carved and bronze-bedecked mahogany doors at the
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: entirely owing to him that I was educated at Louis le Grand. I owe
to him everything that I have - or, rather, everything that I had;
for of my own free will I have cut myself adrift, and to-day I
possess nothing save what I can earn for myself in the theatre or
elsewhere."
She sat stunned and pale under that cruel blow to her swelling pride.
Had he told her this but yesterday, it would have made no impression
upon her, it would have mattered not at all; the event of to-day
coming as a sequel would but have enhanced him in her eyes. But
coming now, after her imagination had woven for him so magnificent a
background, after the rashly assumed discovery of his splendid
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