| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: it when he first told me, but afterwards I saw through
it,--and it was merely a maudlin misapprehension of his.
He'd got three or four things all mixed up together.
You've never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You'd
enjoy him at Hadlow House. He smells of rum a hundred
yards off. What little brain he's got left is soaked in it.
The first time I was ever camping with him, I had to lick
him for drinking the methylated spirits we were using with
our tin stove. Oh, you'd have liked him!"
"Evidently," said Lord Plowden, upon reflection, "it was
all a most unfortunate and--ah--most deplorable mistake."
 The Market-Place |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: He was strong, could drink a great deal of wine, but did not care
about it; and when the men round him were drinking spirits, he took
sugar and water, having a contemptuous pity even for the earliest
stages of excitement from drink. It was the same with gambling.
He had looked on at a great deal of gambling in Paris, watching it
as if it had been a disease. He was no more tempted by such winning
than he was by drink. He had said to himself that the only winning
he cared for must be attained by a conscious process of high,
difficult combination tending towards a beneficent result.
The power he longed for could not be represented by agitated fingers
clutching a heap of coin, or by the half-barbarous, half-idiotic
 Middlemarch |