| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: application than divines have been wont to think? What if
individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time for
a special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth,
and the salt of the world? What if they have, each in their turn,
abused that divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead
of the ministers, of the less enlightened? To increase the
inequalities of nature by their own selfishness, instead of
decreasing them, into the equality of grace, by their own self-
sacrifice? What if the Bible after all was right, and even more
right than we were taught to think?
So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to it, you think me
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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: breach between them in 1861. The actual external facts of that
story are common property, and there is no need to repeat
them.¹ According to general opinion, the quarrel between the
two greatest writers of the day arose out of their literary
rivalry.
It is my intention to show cause against this generally
received opinion, and before I come to Turgénieff's visits
to Yásnaya Polyána, I want to make as clear as I can
the real reason of the perpetual discords between these two
good-hearted people, who had a cordial affection for each other--
discords which led in the end to an out-and-out quarrel and the
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