| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation
was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent
were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their
parents.
Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were,
of course, most marked in those fields where on the one hand highly
abstract elements were concerned, or where on the other hand there
was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all
organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption
as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked.
Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each
Shadow out of Time |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: perspective that had disclosed itself to their view, and was indulging
in seriously meant discussions over the social problems, the old powers
of society had groomed themselves, had gathered together, had
deliberated and found an unexpected support in the mass of the
nation--the peasants and small traders--all of whom threw themselves on
a sudden upon the political stage, after the barriers of the July
monarchy had fallen down.
The second period, from May 4, 1848, to the end of May, 1849, is the
period of the constitution, of the founding of the bourgeois republic
immediately after the February days, not only was the dynastic
opposition surprised by the republicans, and the republicans by the
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: new relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her
communications as impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as
though the state, the world, indeed, had taken her off his hands,
assuming the maintenance of a temperament that had long exhausted
his slender store of reciprocity.
In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself
with literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the
extension of her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a
tragic importunity. He knew, of course, that they were wonderful;
that, unlike the authors who give their essence to the public and
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: exquisite mouthful."
The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray
house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the
finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact
that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes,
abound the more richly in its special sense--the sense of having
been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had
probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no
doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet
drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond
between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes
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