| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: he would have liked to gamble, rather than take the alternative
which was beginning to urge itself as inevitable.
That alternative was to apply to Mr. Bulstrode. Lydgate had
so many times boasted both to himself and others that he was
totally independent of Bulstrode, to whose plans he had lent
himself solely because they enabled him to carry out his own ideas
of professional work and public benefit--he had so constantly
in their personal intercourse had his pride sustained by the sense
that he was making a good social use of this predominating banker,
whose opinions he thought contemptible and whose motives often
seemed to him an absurd mixture of contradictory impressions--
Middlemarch |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles
of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the
churchyard, between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for
them from the wild vines that overran the surrounding trees;
reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones;
or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the
adjacent mill-pond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung
sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.
From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of
traveling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from
house to house, so that his appearance was always greeted with
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
