| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Noailles, Lafayettes were but the storks among the cranes involved
in the wholesale doom due not to each individual, but to a system
and a class.
Profligacy, pride, idleness--these are the vices which we have to
lay to the charge of the Teutonic Nobility of the Ancien Regime in
France especially; and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the
whole continent of Europe. But below them, and perhaps the cause of
them all, lay another and deeper vice--godlessness--atheism.
I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal unbelief. I mean
want of belief in duty, in responsibility. Want of belief that
there was a living God governing the universe, who had set them
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet
the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A
cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous
beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a
surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model,
but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a
finely-moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a
want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and
tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the
regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not
easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the
The Fall of the House of Usher |
