| 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: would ruin the discipline of the army; but Secretary Stanton had
a warm heart, and it is doubtful if he ever willingly enforced
the justice that he criticized the President for tempering with
so much mercy.
Yet Mr. Lincoln could be sternly just when necessary. A law
declaring the slave trade to be piracy had stood on the statute
books of the United States for half a century. Lincoln's
administration was the first to convict a man under it, and
Lincoln himself decreed that the well-deserved sentence be
carried out.
Mr. Lincoln sympathized keenly with the hardships and trials 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 Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the tumult a groan that seemed to come from the very heart of
the earth, as she painfully drew her keel over hidden reefs.
Over five of these (as was afterwards found) she had already
drifted, and she rose and fell more than once on the high waves
at the very mouth of the cove, like a wild bird hovering ere it
pounces.
Then there came one of those great confluences of waves
described already, which, lifting her bodily upward, higher and
higher and higher, suddenly rushed with her into the basin,
filling it like an opened dry-dock, crashing and roaring round
the vessel and upon the rocks, then sweeping out again and
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