| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: gone.
There could be no mistake. The live eye that had been watching him
through a hole in the tapestry was gone. The firelight no longer
shone on a reflecting surface.
And instantly Dick awoke to the terrors of his position. Hatch's
warning, the mute signals of the priest, this eye that had observed
him from the wall, ran together in his mind. He saw he had been
put upon his trial, that he had once more betrayed his suspicions,
and that, short of some miracle, he was lost.
"If I cannot get me forth out of this house," he thought, "I am a
dead man! And this poor Matcham, too - to what a cockatrice's nest
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: the development of this change, yet another is developed: the
moral tends to become more indeterminate and large. It
ceases to be possible to append it, in a tag, to the bottom
of the piece, as one might write the name below a caricature;
and the fable begins to take rank with all other forms of
creative literature, as something too ambitious, in spite of
its miniature dimensions, to be resumed in any succinct
formula without the loss of all that is deepest and most
suggestive in it.
Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands
the term; there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of
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