| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: arms one day as he sat on the doorstep crooning to
it a song such as the mothers sing to babies in his
mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it
some harm. Women are funny. And she had ob-
jected to him praying aloud in the evening. Why?
He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud
after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old
father when he was a child--in his own country.
And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow
up so that he could have a man to talk with in that
language that to our ears sounded so disturbing,
 Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: --Here stands wit--and there stands judgment, close beside it, just like
the two knobs I'm speaking of, upon the back of this self-same chair on
which I am sitting.
--You see, they are the highest and most ornamental parts of its frame--as
wit and judgment are of ours--and like them too, indubitably both made and
fitted to go together, in order, as we say in all such cases of duplicated
embellishments--to answer one another.
Now for the sake of an experiment, and for the clearer illustrating this
matter--let us for a moment take off one of these two curious ornaments (I
care not which) from the point or pinnacle of the chair it now stands on--
nay, don't laugh at it,--but did you ever see, in the whole course of your
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