| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: and apple tree. The neighborhood women viewed these negligees
with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim,
starched gingham skirts. They said it was disgusting --and
perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome.
Blanche Devine--snipping her sweet peas, peering anxiously at the
Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the
trellis, watering the flower baskets that hung from her
porch--was blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I
wish one of us had just stopped to call good morning to her over
the fence, and to say in our neighborly, small-town way: "My,
ain't this a scorcher! So early too! It'll be fierce by noon!"
One Basket |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: be, and for this reason.
War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which
fallen man inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that
it reverses the very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than
pestilence. For instead of issuing in the survival of the
fittest, it issues in the survival of the less fit: and
therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations yet unborn.
And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised,
humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same
ill effect.
In the first place, tens of thousands--who knows it not?--lead
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