| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: as handsome as their masters, and not subjected to especial
ignominy or hardship. These slaves, of whom there were at least
one hundred thousand adult males, relieved the twenty-five
thousand freemen of nearly all the severe drudgery of life; and
the result was an amount of leisure perhaps never since known on
an equal scale in history.
[67] See Herod. V. 97; Aristoph. Ekkl. 432; Thukyd. II. 13;
Plutarch, Perikl. 37.
The relations of master and slave in ancient Athens constituted,
of course, a very different phenomenon from anything which the
history of our own Southern States has to offer us. Our Southern
 The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: thoughts. And their own country, their dear, distant country,
recaptured them little by little, seizing on their imaginations,
and sending to them from afar her shapes, her sounds, her
well-known prospects, her odors--odors of the green lands where
the salt sea-air was blowing.
No longer conscious of the exhalations of the Parisian stables,
on which the earth of the banlieue fattens, they scented the
perfume of the flowering broom, which the salt breeze of the open
sea plucks and bears away. And the sails of the boats from the
river banks seemed like the white wings of the coasting vessels
seen beyond the great plain which extended from their homes to
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