The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: a little child.
I sobbed and cried, too, and for a long time we stayed weeping
tears of joy, with the screen between us, and we were neither of us
ashamed, but both so joyful that I look on that moment as one of
the happiest in my whole life.
No arguments or homilies could ever have effected what the
emotion I experienced at that moment did. Such tears as those shed
by a father of sixty can never be forgotten even in moments of the
strongest temptation.
My father observed my inward life most attentively between the
ages of sixteen and twenty, noted all my doubts and hesitations,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: chrysanthemums, and I suppose that for two hundred miles round there was
not a rose to be bought for love or money. Only in the garden of a friend
of mine, in a sunny corner between the oven and the brick wall, there was a
rose tree growing which had on it one bud. It was white, and it had been
promised to the fair haired girl to wear at the party.
The evening came; when I arrived and went to the waiting-room, to take off
my mantle, I found the girl there already. She was dressed in pure white,
with her great white arms and shoulders showing, and her bright hair
glittering in the candle-light, and the white rose fastened at her breast.
She looked like a queen. I said "Good-evening," and turned away quickly to
the glass to arrange my old black scarf across my old black dress.
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