| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: Edward, what satisfaction canst thou make
For bearing arms, for stirring up my subjects,
And all the trouble thou hast turn'd me to?
PRINCE.
Speak like a subject, proud, ambitious York!
Suppose that I am now my father's mouth;
Resign thy chair, and where I stand kneel thou,
Whilst I propose the selfsame words to thee
Which, traitor, thou wouldst have me answer to.
QUEEN MARGARET.
Ah, thy father had been so resolv'd!
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: matter nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near
we came to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent
reminder of benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to
stay another hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of
puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he,
with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.
"Good riddance!" shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.
On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying
reality of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to
me, in all human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the
established method, that is to say, between ideas and the rule of
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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 Dreams by Olive Schreiner: Death, who seals all things, had drawn the edges together, and closed it
up.
And they buried him. And still the people went about saying, "Where did he
find his colour from?"
And it came to pass that after a while the artist was forgotten--but the
work lived.
St. Leonards-on-Sea.
X. "I THOUGHT I STOOD."
I thought I stood in Heaven before God's throne, and God asked me what I
had come for. I said I had come to arraign my brother, Man.
God said, "What has he done?"
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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 Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: woman's ingenuity the pleasures with which she filled his life, that
all unwittingly she was the cause of the cashier's downfall.
Like many women who seem by nature destined to sound all the depths of
love, Mme. de la Garde was disinterested. She asked neither for gold
nor for jewelry, gave no thought to the future, lived entirely for the
present and for the pleasures of the present. She accepted expensive
ornaments and dresses, the carriage so eagerly coveted by women of her
class, as one harmony the more in the picture of life. There was
absolutely no vanity in her desire not to appear at a better advantage
but to look the fairer, and moreover, no woman could live without
luxuries more cheerfully. When a man of generous nature (and military
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