| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: And hull with power,
And I'll be a millstone
And grind the flour.
As soon as this game was finished our little friend
arranged the children against the wall for another game.
Everything was in readiness. They were about to begin,
when one of the larger girls whispered something in her
ear. She stepped back, put her hands behind her, hung
her head and thought a moment.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses,
their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which
possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their
"Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and
characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's
life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of
variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister,
cut short before it had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a
crisis, which is neither spleen nor disgust, but combines all the
symptoms of both. When a human being is transplanted into an
uncongenial soil, to lead a starved, stunted existence, there is
|