| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the boatman had lowered and reefed the sail, and stood for the
light-ship. They must be on board of her, if anywhere.
"There are safe there?" asked Philip, eagerly.
"Only place where they would be safe, then," said the
spokesman.
"Unless the light-ship parts," said an old fellow.
"Parts!" said the other. "Sixty fathom of two-inch chain, and
old Joe talks about parting."
"Foolish, of course," said Philip; "but it's a dangerous
shore."
"That's so," was the answer. "Never saw so many lines of reef
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: ALCIBIADES: He cannot.
SOCRATES: The bad, then, are miserable?
ALCIBIADES: Yes, very.
SOCRATES: And if so, not he who has riches, but he who has wisdom, is
delivered from his misery?
ALCIBIADES: Clearly.
SOCRATES: Cities, then, if they are to be happy, do not want walls, or
triremes, or docks, or numbers, or size, Alcibiades, without virtue?
(Compare Arist. Pol.)
ALCIBIADES: Indeed they do not.
SOCRATES: And you must give the citizens virtue, if you mean to administer
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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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of
Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish
Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the
greatest of teetotallers.
Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then
rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous
result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all
(with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving
Shakespear with a much worse character than he deserves. For though
it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or
not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he
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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 Death of the Lion by Henry James: attracts such attention. I was honoured only last week, as a
representative of THE TATLER, with the confidence of Guy
Walsingham, the brilliant author of 'Obsessions.' She pronounced
herself thoroughly pleased with my sketch of her method; she went
so far as to say that I had made her genius more comprehensible
even to herself."
Neil Paraday had dropped on the garden-bench and sat there at once
detached and confounded; he looked hard at a bare spot in the lawn,
as if with an anxiety that had suddenly made him grave. His
movement had been interpreted by his visitor as an invitation to
sink sympathetically into a wicker chair that stood hard by, and
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