| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw: life as when I came to know Johnny as a man of business and found out
what he was really like. How did you manage with your sons?
LORD SUMMERHAYS. Well, I really hadnt time to be a father: thats the
plain truth of the matter. Their poor dear mother did the usual thing
while they were with us. Then of course, Harrow, Cambridge, the usual
routine of their class. I saw very little of them, and thought very
little about them: how could I? with a whole province on my hands.
They and I are--acquaintances. Not perhaps, quite ordinary
acquaintances: theres a sort of--er--I should almost call it a sort
of remorse about the way we shake hands (when we do shake hands) which
means, I suppose, that we're sorry we dont care more for one another;
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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 American by Henry James: "What is the matter?" he asked, commandingly; "what is happening?"
Urbain de Bellegarde stared, then left his place and came
and leaned upon his mother's chair, behind. Newman's sudden
irruption had evidently discomposed both mother and son.
Madame de Cintre stood silent, with her eyes resting upon Newman's.
She had often looked at him with all her soul, as it seemed to him;
but in this present gaze there was a sort of bottomless depth.
She was in distress; it was the most touching thing he had ever seen.
His heart rose into his throat, and he was on the point of turning
to her companions, with an angry challenge; but she checked him,
pressing the hand that held her own.
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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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: happy abode of Apollo, who spreadest afar the light of the glory of
thy name!"
"This fine tirade," says Dr. Maurice Raynaud--from whose charming
book on the "Doctors of the Time of Moliere" I quote--"is not, as
one might think, the translation of a piece of poetry. It is simply
part of a public oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most
illustrious chancellors of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier in
the seventeenth century." "From time immemorial," he says, "'the
faculty' of Montpellier had made itself remarkable by a singular
mixture of the sacred and the profane. The theses which were
sustained there began by an invocation to God, the Blessed Virgin,
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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 St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: who was a little, spruce, ruddy man of an impatient temper, pished
and pshawed and swore over his patient. 'Nothing to be made of
him!' he cried. 'A perfect heathen. If we could only find the
weapon!' But the weapon had ceased to exist. A little resined
twine was perhaps blowing about in the castle gutters; some bits of
broken stick may have trailed in corners; and behold, in the
pleasant air of the morning, a dandy prisoner trimming his nails
with a pair of scissors!
Finding the wounded man so firm, you may be sure the authorities
did not leave the rest of us in peace. No stone was left unturned.
We were had in again and again to be examined, now singly, now in
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