| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: without the guides, which if they would be persuaded not to do,
they would very rarely fail of going or coming safe.
From Lynn I bent my course to Downham, where is an ugly wooden
bridge over the Ouse; from whence we passed the fen country to
Wisbeach, but saw nothing that way to tempt our curiosity but deep
roads, innumerable drains and dykes of water, all navigable, and a
rich soil, the land bearing a vast quantity of good hemp, but a
base unwholesome air; so we came back to Ely, whose cathedral,
standing in a level flat country, is seen far and wide, and of
which town, when the minster, so they call it, is described,
everything remarkable is said that there is room to say. And of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: It is curious that the sudden decay of my father's memory
displayed itself only in the matter of real facts and people. He
was entirely unaffected in his literary work, and everything that
he wrote down to the last days of his life is marked by his
characteristic logicalness and force. It may be that the reason he
forgot the details of real life was because he was too deeply
absorbed in his abstract work.
My wife was at Yásnaya Polyána in October, and
when she came home she told me that there was something wrong
there. "Your mother is nervous and hysterical; your father is in
a silent and gloomy frame of mind."
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