| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: flushed with nationality, as Boswell would have said,
ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing stones at
the author of 'Robinson Crusoe' as he looked out of
window.
One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going
to pass his TRIALS (examinations as we now say) for the
Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament Close open and had a
vision of the mouth of Hell. This, and small wonder, was
the means of his conversion. Nor was the vision
unsuitable to the locality; for after an hospital, what
uglier piece is there in civilisation than a court 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 The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing, half-seeing,
to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the drawing-room.
"Aunt Lucy," she volunteered, "I don't like the smell of broom;
it reminds me of funerals."
"Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such foolish
things, dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant."
Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her aunts,
their views, and the way they lived. Indeed this was a subject
that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park,
and blotted out the trees and the people and the deer. Why did
they do the things they did, and what did they feel, and what was
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