| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: lined walls to verify some reference. He could not combine the brutal
judge and the industrious, dispassionate student; the connecting link
escaped him; from such a dual nature, it was impossible he should
predict behaviour; and he asked himself if he had done well to plunge
into a business of which the end could not be foreseen? and presently
after, with a sickening decline of confidence, if he had done loyally to
strike his father? For he had struck him - defied him twice over and
before a cloud of witnesses - struck him a public buffet before crowds.
Who had called him to judge his father in these precarious and high
questions? The office was usurped. It might have become a stranger; in
a son - there was no blinking it - in a son, it was disloyal. And now,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: wings of the bird flapped in unison. When clouds gathered on the
horizon and the thunder rumbled, Loulou would scream, perhaps because
he remembered the storms in his native forests. The dripping of the
rain would excite him to frenzy; he flapped around, struck the ceiling
with his wings, upset everything, and would finally fly into the
garden to play. Then he would come back into the room, light on one of
the andirons, and hop around in order to get dry.
One morning during the terrible winter of 1837, when she had put him
in front of the fire-place on account of the cold, she found him dead
in his cage, hanging to the wire bars with his head down. He had
probably died of congestion. But she believed that he had been
A Simple Soul |
