| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: admitted. Nor can we maintain of some other dialogues, such as the
Parmenides, and the Sophist, and Politicus, that no considerable objection
can be urged against them, though greatly overbalanced by the weight
(chiefly) of internal evidence in their favour. Nor, on the other hand,
can we exclude a bare possibility that some dialogues which are usually
rejected, such as the Greater Hippias and the Cleitophon, may be genuine.
The nature and object of these semi-Platonic writings require more careful
study and more comparison of them with one another, and with forged
writings in general, than they have yet received, before we can finally
decide on their character. We do not consider them all as genuine until
they can be proved to be spurious, as is often maintained and still more
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: my tastes.
LADY BASILDON. You look quite English, Vicomte, quite English.
[They pass out. MR. MONTFORD, a perfectly groomed young dandy,
approaches MRS. MARCHMONT.]
MR. MONTFORD. Like some supper, Mrs. Marchmont?
MRS. MARCHMONT. [Languidly.] Thank you, Mr. Montford, I never touch
supper. [Rises hastily and takes his arm.] But I will sit beside
you, and watch you.
MR. MONTFORD. I don't know that I like being watched when I am
eating!
MRS. MARCHMONT. Then I will watch some one else.
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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 Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: A joke so foolish and unfilial wasn't worth explaining.
"It was nothing--ridiculous--in the worst of taste, but still, if you
half shut your eyes and looked--" Katharine half shut her eyes and
looked, but she looked in the wrong direction, and Cassandra laughed
more than ever, and was still laughing and doing her best to explain
in a whisper that Aunt Eleanor, through half-shut eyes, was like the
parrot in the cage at Stogdon House, when the gentlemen came in and
Rodney walked straight up to them and wanted to know what they were
laughing at.
"I utterly refuse to tell you!" Cassandra replied, standing up
straight, clasping her hands in front of her, and facing him. Her
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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 The Aspern Papers by Henry James: Then it came to me that she WAS tremendously old--
so old that death might take her at any moment, before I had time
to get what I wanted from her. The next thought was a correction
to that; it lighted up the situation. She would die next week,
she would die tomorrow--then I could seize her papers.
Meanwhile she sat there neither moving nor speaking. She was
very small and shrunken, bent forward, with her hands in her lap.
She was dressed in black, and her head was wrapped in a piece
of old black lace which showed no hair.
My emotion keeping me silent she spoke first, and the remark
she made was exactly the most unexpected.
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