| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: before.
What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine
speech, word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the
lady might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished
his conversation with the Huma daily during that whole interval of
years. On the contrary, he had never once thought of the odious
fowl until the recurrence of precisely the same circumstances
brought up precisely the same idea. He ought to have been proud of
the accuracy of his mental adjustments. Given certain factors, and
a sound brain should always evolve the same fixed product with the
certainty of Babbage's calculating machine.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde: marvellous rose, petal following petal, as song followed song.
Pale was it, at first, as the mist that hangs over the river - pale
as the feet of the morning, and silver as the wings of the dawn.
As the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver, as the shadow of a
rose in a water-pool, so was the rose that blossomed on the topmost
spray of the Tree.
But the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the
thorn. "Press closer, little Nightingale," cried the Tree, "or the
Day will come before the rose is finished."
So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and louder and
louder grew her song, for she sang of the birth of passion in the
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