| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: with no Golden River to seek for. Level lines of dewy mist lay
stretched along the valley, out of which rose the massy mountains,
their lower cliffs in pale gray shadow, hardly distinguishable from
the floating vapor but gradually ascending till they caught the
sunlight, which ran in sharp touches of ruddy color along the
angular crags, and pierced, in long, level rays, through their
fringes of spearlike pine. Far above shot up red, splintered masses
of castellated rock, jagged and shivered into myriads of fantastic
forms, with here and there a streak of sunlit snow traced down their
chasms like a line of forked lightning; and far beyond and far above
all these, fainter than the morning cloud but purer and changeless,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: worst, said Aristotle; and the great religions of the world, and
especially this Christianity of ours, are the ones most darkened
and divided and wasted by the fussings and false exactitudes of
the creed-monger and the sectary. There is no lie so bad as a
stale disfigured truth. There is no heresy so damnable as a
narrow orthodoxy. All religious associations carry this danger of
the over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that
divides and betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine,
because you are gathered in this queerly beautiful old building
today, because I preside here in this odd raiment of an odder
compromise, because you see about you in coloured glass and
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