| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, joined to that
queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to
Scotland, had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from
childhood, by an education so abominable, that anyone who knows what
words she must have heard, what scenes she must have beheld in
France, from her youth up, will wonder that she sinned so little:
not that she sinned so much. One may feel, in a word, that there is
every excuse for those who have asserted Mary's innocence, because
their own high-mindedness shrank from believing her guilty: but
yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, may have felt as deeply
that he could do no otherwise than he did.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: chorus. The youth and his fellows were frozen
to silence. They could see a flag that tossed in
the smoke angrily. Near it were the blurred and
agitated forms of troops. There came a turbulent
stream of men across the fields. A battery chang-
ing position at a frantic gallop scattered the
stragglers right and left.
A shell screaming like a storm banshee went
over the huddled heads of the reserves. It landed
in the grove, and exploding redly flung the brown
earth. There was a little shower of pine needles.
The Red Badge of Courage |
