| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth
alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and
villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking
pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to
another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at
times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was
apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of
conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was
guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities
seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was
possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: enough, as it ranges away towards the sand, to convey the idea of
amphibious vegetation,--a primitive flora as yet undecided
whether to retain marine habits and forms, or to assume
terrestrial ones;--and the occasional inspection of surprising
shapes might strengthen this fancy. Queer flat-lying and
many-branching things, which resemble sea-weeds in juiciness and
color and consistency, crackle under your feet from time to time;
the moist and weighty air seems heated rather from below than
from above,--less by the sun than by the radiation of a cooling
world; and the mists of morning or evening appear to simulate the
vapory exhalation of volcanic forces,--latent, but only dozing,
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