| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: Northern Whigs and all those Democrats who objected to slavery
joined in what became known as the Republican party. It was at a
great mass convention held in Bloomington in May, 1856, that the
Republican party of Illinois took final shape; and it was here
that Lincoln made the wonderful address which has become famous
in party history as his "lost speech." There had been much
enthusiasm. Favorite speakers had already made stirring addresses
that had been listened to with eagerness and heartily applauded;
but hardly a man moved from his seat until Lincoln should be
heard. It was he who had given up the chance of being senator to
help on the cause of freedom. He alone had successfully answered
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where
reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in inferences
wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less than in
other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are
enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and
closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.
This place was the Little Hintock of the master-barber's search.
The coming night gradually obscured the smoke of the chimneys, but
the position of the sequestered little world could still be
distinguished by a few faint lights, winking more or less
ineffectually through the leafless boughs, and the undiscerned
The Woodlanders |
