| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: On one knee
Kneeling, I gave it, which she caught, and dashed
Unopened at her feet: a tide of fierce
Invective seemed to wait behind her lips,
As waits a river level with the dam
Ready to burst and flood the world with foam:
And so she would have spoken, but there rose
A hubbub in the court of half the maids
Gathered together: from the illumined hall
Long lanes of splendour slanted o'er a press
Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to keep out of
their neighbourhood. . . . At least, and whether he liked it
or not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled
as a subject of the English crown.
(1) BOUGEOIS DE PARIS, ed. Pantheon, pp. 688, 689.
We hear nothing of Villon's father except that he was poor
and of mean extraction. His mother was given piously, which
does not imply very much in an old Frenchwoman, and quite
uneducated. He had an uncle, a monk in an abbey at Angers,
who must have prospered beyond the family average, and was
reported to be worth five or six hundred crowns. Of this
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