| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: seen the pictures.' The argument is not so childish as it seems;
for I doubt if these islanders are acquainted with any other mode
of representation but photography; so that the picture of an event
(on the old melodrama principle that 'the camera cannot lie,
Joseph,') would appear strong proof of its occurrence. The fact
amused us the more because our slides were some of them ludicrously
silly, and one (Christ before Pilate) was received with shouts of
merriment, in which even Maka was constrained to join.
SUNDAY, JULY 28. - Karaiti came to ask for a repetition of the
'phantoms' - this was the accepted word - and, having received a
promise, turned and left my humble roof without the shadow of a
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: "So novel an art demands study in the public, study of a kind that may
develop the feelings to which music appeals. That sentiment hardly
exists as yet among you--a nation given up to philosophical theories,
to analysis and discussion, and always torn by civil disturbances.
Modern music demands perfect peace; it is the language of loving and
sentimental souls, inclined to lofty emotional aspiration.
"That language, a thousand times fuller than the language of words, is
to speech and ideas what the thought is to its utterance; it arouses
sensations and ideas in their primitive form, in that part of us where
sensations and ideas have their birth, but leaves them as they are in
each of us. That power over our inmost being is one of the grandest
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