| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: and makes the night even blacker to him; he goes to the station.
The platform and steps of the station are wet. Here and there are
white patches of freshly fallen melting snow. In the station
itself it is light and as hot as a steam-bath. There is a smell
of paraffin. Except for the weighing-machine and a yellow seat on
which a man wearing a guard's uniform is asleep, there is no
furniture in the place at all. On the left are two wide-open
doors. Through one of them the telegraphic apparatus and a lamp
with a green shade on it can be seen; through the other, a small
room, half of it taken up by a dark cupboard. In this room the
head guard and the engine-driver are sitting on the window-sill.
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: the Anglo-Danish nobility by William and his Frenchmen. Those two
terrible calamities, following each other in the short space of
fifty years, seem to have welded together, by a community of
suffering, all ranks and races, at least south of the Tweed; and
when the English rose after the storm, they rose as one homogeneous
people, never to be governed again by an originally alien race. The
English nobility were, from the time of Magna Charta, rather an
official nobility, than, as in most continental countries, a
separate caste; and whatever caste tendencies had developed
themselves before the Wars of the Roses (as such are certain to do
during centuries of continued wealth and power), were crushed out by
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