| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: pressing the land of the one beloved, doomed to perpetual
toil unlit by any ray of joy or hope.
Their evident affection and unhappy condition moved the
heart of His Majesty, and caused him to allow them to visit
each other once with each revolving year,--on the seventh
day of the seventh moon. But permission was not enough,
for as they looked upon the foaming waters of the turbulent
stream, they could but weep for their wretched condition,
for no bridge united its two banks, nor was it allowed that
any structure be built which would mar the contour of the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: Even Newton seems to have hankered after it when young. Among his
MSS. in Lord Portsmouth's library at Hurstbourne are whole folios of
astrologic calculations. It went on till the end of the seventeenth
century, and died out only when men had begun to test it, and all
other occult sciences, by experience, and induction founded thereon.
Countless students busied themselves over the transmutation of
metals. As for magic, necromancy, pyromancy, geomancy,
coscinomancy, and all the other mancies--there was then a whole
literature about them. And the witch-burning inquisitors like
Sprenger, Bodin, Delrio, and the rest, believed as firmly in the
magic powers of the poor wretches whom they tortured to death, as
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