| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: he was able to catch nothing in the incoherent sentences
that served to throw any real light upon the problem that they
were all eager to solve.
When the sun reappeared on the western horizon the professor
was still sound asleep; and Ben Zoof, who was especially
anxious that the repose which promised to be so beneficial
should not be disturbed, felt considerable annoyance at hearing
a loud knocking, evidently of some blunt heavy instrument against
a door that had been placed at the entrance of the gallery,
more for the purpose of retaining internal warmth than for guarding
against intrusion from without.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and
immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or
heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design,
shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we
all sit down, the hanger-back not least. But the average sermon
flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we
know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded,
and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the
average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-
hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he
should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann.
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