| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: been suffered to imbibe), but still behaved as well as he knew how.
Hargrave and Annabella, from different motives and in different
ways, emulated me, and doubtless both surpassed me, the former in
his discursive versatility and eloquence, the latter in boldness
and animation at least. Milicent, delighted to see her husband,
her brother, and her over-estimated friend acquitting themselves so
well, was lively and gay too, in her quiet way. Even Lord
Lowborough caught the general contagion: his dark greenish eyes
were lighted up beneath their moody brows; his sombre countenance
was beautified by smiles; all traces of gloom and proud or cold
reserve had vanished for the time; and he astonished us all, not
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: SOCRATES: You see that it is not safe for a man either rashly to accept
whatever is offered him, or himself to request a thing, if he is likely to
suffer thereby or immediately to lose his life. And yet we could tell of
many who, having long desired and diligently laboured to obtain a tyranny,
thinking that thus they would procure an advantage, have nevertheless
fallen victims to designing enemies. You must have heard of what happened
only the other day, how Archelaus of Macedonia was slain by his beloved
(compare Aristotle, Pol.), whose love for the tyranny was not less than
that of Archelaus for him. The tyrannicide expected by his crime to become
tyrant and afterwards to have a happy life; but when he had held the
tyranny three or four days, he was in his turn conspired against and slain.
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. The Barrot-Falloux ministry
had weathered the republican constitutive convention, whose term of life
it had shortened with more or less violence, and found itself still at
the helm. Changamier, the General of the allied royalists continued to
unite in his person the command-in-chief of the First Military Division
and of the Parisian National Guard. Finally, the general elections had
secured the large majority in the National Assembly to the party of
Order. Here the Deputies and Peers of Louis Phillipe met a saintly
crowd of Legitimists, for whose benefit numerous ballots of the nation
had been converted into admission tickets to the political stage. The
Bonapartist representatives were too thinly sowed to be able to build an
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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 Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: and fined.
The great majority of slaveholders hate this class
of persons with a hatred that can only be equalled
by the condemned spirits of the infernal regions.
They have no mercy upon, nor sympathy for, any
negro whom they cannot enslave. They say that
God made the black man to be a slave for the white,
and act as though they really believed that all free
persons of colour are in open rebellion to a direct
command from heaven, and that they (the whites)
are God's chosen agents to pour out upon them
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
