| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: All the morning I thought how proud I should be
To stand there straight as a queen,
Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me --
But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.
It was nearly level along the beaten track
And the brambles caught in my gown --
But it's no use now to think of turning back,
The rest of the way will be only going down.
XI
Summer Storm
The panther wind
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: Express Drivers' Union No. 927 over the handling of a small heap
of baggage at the Ferry Building. A few heads were broken, a
score of arrests made, and the baggage was delivered. No one
would have guessed that behind this petty wrangle was the fine
Irish hand of Hegan, made potent by the Klondike gold of Burning
Daylight. It was an insignificant affair at best--or so it
seemed. But the Teamsters' Union took up the quarrel, backed by
the whole Water Front Federation. Step by step, the strike
became involved. A refusal of cooks and waiters to serve scab
teamsters or teamsters' employers brought out the cooks and
waiters. The butchers and meat-cutters refused to handle meat
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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 The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: society. So far from it, it is but the first or second step out of
primeval savagery. For the more a ruling race becomes conscious of
its own duty, and not merely of its own power--the more it learns to
regard its peculiar gifts as entrusted to it for the good of men--so
much the more earnestly will it labour to raise the masses below to
its own level, by imparting to them its own light; and so will it
continually tend to abolish itself, by producing a general equality,
moral and intellectual; and fulfil that law of self-sacrifice which
is the beginning and the end of all virtue.
A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as
noble as themselves--that is at least a fair ideal, tending toward,
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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 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the
diaphragm, and the succussations of the intercostal and abdominal muscles
in laughter, to drive the gall and other bitter juices from the gall-
bladder, liver, and sweet-bread of his majesty's subjects, with all the
inimicitious passions which belong to them, down into their duodenums.
Chapter 2.LVIII.
--But can the thing be undone, Yorick? said my father--for in my opinion,
continued he, it cannot. I am a vile canonist, replied Yorick--but of all
evils, holding suspence to be the most tormenting, we shall at least know
the worst of this matter. I hate these great dinners--said my father--The
size of the dinner is not the point, answered Yorick--we want, Mr. Shandy,
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