| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: Studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls she
chanced to meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherished
and watched over by those they loved.
The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her.
She knew she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot,
stuffy room. The begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the
passing of elevated trains. The place was filled with a whirl of
noises and odors.
She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the
room, mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out,
with heads bended over their work, tales of imagined or real
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: attention was attracted toward a small cluster of trees a short
distance to his right. The low sun was casting long shadows. It
would soon be night. The trees were off the path that he had
chosen and he had little mind to be diverted from his way; but as
he looked again he hesitated. There was something there besides
boles of trees, and underbrush. There were suggestions of
familiar lines of the handicraft of man. Gahan stopped and
strained his eyes in the direction of the thing that had arrested
his attention. No, he must be mistaken--the branches of the trees
and a low bush had taken on an unnatural semblance in the
horizontal rays of the setting sun. He turned and continued upon
The Chessmen of Mars |
