| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: horse over, the boat being small and not fit for it: and at last could not
do it without unloading the baggage and making him swim over.
From the river they travelled towards the forest, but when they came
to Walthamstow the people of that town denied to admit them, as was
the case everywhere. The constables and their watchmen kept them
off at a distance and parleyed with them. They gave the same account
of themselves as before, but these gave no credit to what they said,
giving it for a reason that two or three companies had already come
that way and made the like pretences, but that they had given several
people the distemper in the towns where they had passed; and had
been afterwards so hardly used by the country (though with justice,
A Journal of the Plague Year |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound American
customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution
another alien invasion.
And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed
into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear.
The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is
reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of
knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens
are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy
to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their
own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish and of dubious
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