| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: accurate chronometer. Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah! he
will not give himself the trouble either to bend his head, or elevate
his hand, so as to bring the faithful time-keeper within his range
of vision! Time, all at once, appears to have become a matter of no
moment with the Judge!
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda?
Clifford's affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker,
who has undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best
of paper, for a few loose thousands which the Judge happens to
have by him, uninvested. The wrinkled note-shaver will have
taken his railroad trip in vain. Half an hour later, in the street
House of Seven Gables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: It was sometimes suggested that reddlemen were criminals
for whose misdeeds other men wrongfully suffered--that in
escaping the law they had not escaped their own consciences,
and had taken to the trade as a lifelong penance.
Else why should they have chosen it? In the present case
such a question would have been particularly apposite.
The reddleman who had entered Egdon that afternoon was
an instance of the pleasing being wasted to form the
ground-work of the singular, when an ugly foundation would
have done just as well for that purpose. The one point
that was forbidding about this reddleman was his colour.
Return of the Native |
