| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: what they can and cannot do in the matters of carrying
weights, making distance, enduring without deterioration
hard climbs in high altitudes; what they can or cannot
get over in the way of bad places. This last is not
always a matter of appearance merely. Some bits of trail,
seeming impassable to anything but a goat, a Western
horse will negotiate easily; while others, not
particularly terrifying in appearance, offer
complications of abrupt turn or a single bit of unstable,
leg-breaking footing which renders them exceedingly
dangerous. You must, moreover, be able to manage your
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Nana, Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille by Emile Zola: of sprightly suggestiveness that the public warmed amain. The
husband and Steiner, sitting side by side, were laughing
complaisantly, and the whole house broke out in a roar when
Prulliere, that great favorite, appeared as a general, a masquerade
Mars, decked with an enormous plume and dragging along a sword, the
hilt of which reached to his shoulder. As for him, he had had
enough of Diana; she had been a great deal too coy with him, he
averred. Thereupon Diana promised to keep a sharp eye on him and to
be revenged. The duet ended with a comic yodel which Prulliere
delivered very amusingly with the yell of an angry tomcat. He had
about him all the entertaining fatuity of a young leading gentleman
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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 Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: of his powers and the deletion of his personality. To have
lived a generation, is not only to have grown at home in that
perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties. To
die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base,
something of the air of a betrayal. A man does not only
reflect upon what he might have done in a future that is never
to be his; but beholding himself so early a deserter from the
fight, he eats his heart for the good he might have done
already. To have been so useless and now to lose all hope of
being useful any more - there it is that death and memory
assail him. And even if mankind shall go on, founding heroic
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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 Poems by Oscar Wilde: Nor mark it with that blessed Cross
That Christ for sinners gave,
Because the man was one of those
Whom Christ came down to save.
Yet all is well; he has but passed
To Life's appointed bourne:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn
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