| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my
father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured,
not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the
public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I
had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word
among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had
given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools
that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered
then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.
My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should
hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men
are liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves.
To get and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the
stoic; and the Arethusa, who had been surfeited upon that insult,
was blazing inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath. But the
physical had also its part. The cellar in which he was confined
was some feet underground, and it was only lighted by an unglazed,
narrow aperture high up in the wall and smothered in the leaves of
a green vine. The walls were of naked masonry, the floor of bare
earth; by way of furniture there was an earthenware basin, a water-
jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-gray cloak for bedding. To
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Riverman by Stewart Edward White: Orde's bewilderment and anxiety. At this moment Bobby himself
appeared from the direction of the kitchen. Orde, frantic with
alarm, fell upon his son. Bobby, much bewildered by all this
pother, could only mumble something about "smallpox," and "took
mamma away with doctor."
"Where? where, Bobby?" cried Orde, fairly shaking the small boy by
the shoulder. He felt like a man in a bad dream, trying to reach a
goal that constantly eluded him.
At this moment a calm, dry voice broke through the turmoil of
questions and exclamations. Orde looked up to see the tall, angular
form of Doctor McMullen standing in the doorway.
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: she cried, raising her arms, that were like two pieces of carved wood,
"I am a guilty woman; but God never punished any one as he has
punished me! Philippe killed Max, who advised me to do dreadful
things, and now he has killed me. God uses him as a scourge!"
"Leave me alone with her," said Bianchon, "and let me find out if the
disease is curable."
"If you cure her, Philippe Bridau will die of rage," said Desroches.
"I am going to draw up a statement of the condition in which we have
found his wife. He has not brought her before the courts as an
adulteress, and therefore her rights as a wife are intact: he shall
have the shame of a suit. But first, we must remove the Comtesse de
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