| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: an undertaker's mute, and as light as the lead of their type. French
conversation is carried on from one end of the country to the other in
a revolutionary jargon, through long columns of type printed in old
mansions where a press groans in the place where formerly elegant
company used to meet."
"The knell of the highest society is tolling," said a Russian Prince.
"Do you hear it? And the first stroke is your modern word /lady/."
"You are right, Prince," said de Marsay. "The 'perfect lady,' issuing
from the ranks of the nobility, or sprouting from the citizen class,
and the product of every soil, even of the provinces is the expression
of these times, a last remaining embodiment of good taste, grace, wit,
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: waylay him and meet him. He roamed, slowly, warily, but all
restlessly, he himself did - Mrs. Muldoon had been right,
absolutely, with her figure of their "craping"; and the presence he
watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious
and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already
quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from
night to night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in
his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of many
superficially-judging persons, he knew, that he was wasting that
life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure
so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that
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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 Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: by means of a shifting of its weights to drive it up in the air again
as the balloons expanded. This conception, which is still the
structural conception of all successful flying machines, needed,
however, a vast amount of toil upon its details before it could
actually be realised, and such toil Filmer--as he was accustomed
to tell the numerous interviewers who crowded upon him in
the heyday of his fame--"ungrudgingly and unsparingly gave."
His particular difficulty was the elastic lining of the contractile
balloon. He found he needed a new substance, and in the discovery
and manufacture of that new substance he had, as he never failed
to impress upon the interviewers, "performed a far more arduous
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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 The Ruling Passion by Henry van Dyke: quality which Moody called ambition, and to which Hose Ransom gave
the name of imagination, seemed to awaken within him. He saved his
wages. He went into business for himself in a modest way, and made
a good turn in the manufacture of deerskin mittens and snow-shoes.
By the spring he had nearly three hundred dollars laid by, and
bought a piece of land from Ransom on the bank of the river just
above the village.
The second summer of guiding brought him in enough to commence
building a little house. It was of logs, neatly squared at the
corners; and there was a door exactly in the middle of the facade,
with a square window at either side, and another at each end of the
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