| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: face. He had less appetite, and his moods of depression became
so frequent that he could not hide then even from Henriette. She
asked him once or twice if there were not something the matter
with him, and he laughed--a forced and hurried laugh--and told
her that he had sat up too late the night before, worrying over
the matter of his examinations. Oh, what a cruel thing it was
that a man who stood in the very gateway of such a garden of
delight should be tormented and made miserable by this loathsome
idea!
The disturbing symptom still continued, and so at last George
purchased a medical book, dealing with the subject of the
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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 Faith of Men by Jack London: the weary weeks was the gliding of the temperature up to the
unprecedented height of fifteen below. To atone for this, outer
space smote the earth with its cold till the mercury froze and the
spirit thermometer remained more than seventy below for a
fortnight, when it burst. There was no telling how much colder it
was after that. Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity,
was the lengthening of the nights, till day became a mere blink of
light between the darkness.
Neil Bonner was a social animal. The very follies for which he was
doing penance had been bred of his excessive sociability. And
here, in the fourth year of his exile, he found himself in company-
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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 The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: vague only while not confronted with the reality. As soon as the
reality dawned the mental image, retiring with a sigh, became
substantial enough to suffer a slight wrong. Overt, who had spent
a considerable part of his short life in foreign lands, made now,
but not for the first time, the reflexion that whereas in those
countries he had almost always recognised the artist and the man of
letters by his personal "type," the mould of his face, the
character of his head, the expression of his figure and even the
indications of his dress, so in England this identification was as
little as possible a matter of course, thanks to the greater
conformity, the habit of sinking the profession instead of
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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 Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: man would, one fancies, abhor equally that of poisoning many; and
would protest as earnestly against the painful capital punishment
of diarrhoea as against the painless one of hempen rope. Those
who demand mercy for the Sepoy, and immunity for the Coolie women
of Delhi, unsexed by their own brutal and shameless cruelty,
would, one fancies, demand mercy also for the British workman, and
immunity for his wife and family. One is therefore somewhat
startled at finding that the British nation reserves to itself,
though it forbids to its armies, the right of putting to death
unarmed and unoffending men, women, and children.
After further consideration, however, one finds that there are, as
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