The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: a little nervous. "I've been thinking, Rose, about the years
we've lived together here on a Kansas prairie farm--"
"It lacks just a few months of being twenty-eight years," she
added.
"Yes, it sounds like a long time when you put it that way, but it
doesn't seem any longer than a short sigh to me lying here. I've
been thinking, Rose, how you've always got it over to me that you
loved me or could love me--"
"I've always loved you, Martin--deeply."
"Yes, that's what's always made me so hard with you. It would
have been far better for you if you hadn't cared for me at all.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: democratic institutions succeed, whilst those of other countries
fail; hence they conceive an overweening opinion of their
superiority, and they are not very remote from believing
themselves to belong to a distinct race of mankind.
The dangers which threaten the American Union do not
originate in the diversity of interests or of opinions, but in
the various characters and passions of the Americans. The men
who inhabit the vast territory of the United States are almost
all the issue of a common stock; but the effects of the climate,
and more especially of slavery, have gradually introduced very
striking differences between the British settler of the Southern
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