| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Reign of King Edward the Third by William Shakespeare: [Enter Lord Percy.]
KING EDWARD.
Lord Percy! welcome: what's the news in England?
PERCY.
The Queen, my Lord, comes here to your Grace,
And from her highness and the Lord viceregent
I bring this happy tidings of success:
David of Scotland, lately up in arms,
Thinking, belike, he soonest should prevail,
Your highness being absent from the Realm,
Is, by the fruitful service of your peers
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: native to the soil of France! We looked upon these things as upon a
spectacle, and groaned over them, without taking upon ourselves to
act.
Juste, whom no one ever sought, and who never sought any one, was, at
five-and-twenty, a great politician, a man with a wonderful aptitude
for apprehending the correlation between remote history and the facts
of the present and of the future. In 1831, he told me exactly what
would and did happen--the murders, the conspiracies, the ascendency of
the Jews, the difficulty of doing anything in France, the scarcity of
talent in the higher circles, and the abundance of intellect in the
lowest ranks, where the finest courage is smothered under cigar ashes.
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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 Intentions by Oscar Wilde: Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English
prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of
mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack
the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness
of effect that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have
made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as
a form of elaborate design. The Greeks, upon the other hand,
regarded writing simply as a method of chronicling. Their test was
always the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations. The
voice was the medium, and the ear the critic. I have sometimes
thought that the story of Homer's blindness might be really an
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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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: have not been more noted for vast intellectual powers, than for the depth
and intensity of their sexual emotions. And, if possible, with the human
female, the relation between intensity of sexual emotion and high
intellectual gifts has been yet closer. The life of a Sophia Kovalevsky, a
George Eliot, an Elizabeth Browning have not been more marked by a rare
development of the intellect than by deep passionate sexual emotions. Nor
throughout the history of the race has high intelligence and intellectual
power ever tended to make either male or female unattractive to those of
the opposite sex.
The merely brilliantly attired and unintelligent woman, probably never
awakened the same intensity of profound sex emotion even among the men of
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