| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: or change their mode of life, when, one summer's night in June,
they were in their little garden, resting from the labours of the
day. The widow's work was yet upon her knee, and strewn upon the
ground about her; and Barnaby stood leaning on his spade, gazing at
the brightness in the west, and singing softly to himself.
'A brave evening, mother! If we had, chinking in our pockets, but
a few specks of that gold which is piled up yonder in the sky, we
should be rich for life.'
'We are better as we are,' returned the widow with a quiet smile.
'Let us be contented, and we do not want and need not care to have
it, though it lay shining at our feet.'
 Barnaby Rudge |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: our unanimous conviction that no man less fitted for the sea had
ever embarked on it. But to sea he had come. After a week's stay
in a sailors' boarding-house, he had been shoved aboard of us as
an able seaman.
All hands had to do his work for him. Not only did he know
nothing, but he proved himself unable to learn anything. Try as
they would, they could never teach him to steer. To him the
compass must have been a profound and awful whirligig. He never
mastered its cardinal points, much less the checking and steadying
of the ship on her course. He never did come to know whether
ropes should be coiled from left to right or from right to left.
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