| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his
thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must
there not have been in these pictures of the mind - when I beheld
that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with
the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over
all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks
and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same
affection, home.
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of
the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble
red man of old story - over whose own hereditary continent we had
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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 Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: that a plain man knows things by. "That's only because you've
never had a glimpse of it," he returned. "If you had had one the
element in question would soon have become practically all you'd
see. To me it's exactly as palpable as the marble of this chimney.
Besides, the critic just ISN'T a plain man: if he were, pray, what
would he be doing in his neighbour's garden? You're anything but a
plain man yourself, and the very raison d'etre of you all is that
you're little demons of subtlety. If my great affair's a secret,
that's only because it's a secret in spite of itself - the amazing
event has made it one. I not only never took the smallest
precaution to keep it so, but never dreamed of any such accident.
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