| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: there was a feast, and plenty of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol.
They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did
not empty into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic.
They believed it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico.
They turned back, now, and carried their great news to Canada.
But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the proof.
He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last
got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In the dead
of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented
the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a following
of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and twenty-three Frenchmen.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: with what was good in them? He resolved that he would now tell them
what he felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them just
as they reached the corner where the lane joined the main road.
They stood still and began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether
the gastric juices--but he stopped them and began to speak very quickly
and stiffly.
"D'you remember the morning after the dance?" he demanded.
"It was here we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little
heaps of stones. I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning
of life revealed to me in a flash." He paused for a second,
and drew his lips together in a tight little purse. "Love," he said.
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