| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Duchess of Padua by Oscar Wilde: Touch the sweet lips that can such music make.
DUCHESS
To touch my lips is not to touch my heart.
GUIDO
Do you close that against me?
DUCHESS
Alas! my lord,
I have it not: the first day that I saw you
I let you take my heart away from me;
Unwilling thief, that without meaning it
Did break into my fenced treasury
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: These were the days - I will say more -
These were the grand old days of yore!
The builder laboured day and night;
He watched that every brick was right:
The decent men their utmost did;
And the house rose - a pyramid!
These were the days, our provost knows,
When forty streets and crescents rose,
The fruits of my creative noddle,
All more or less upon a model,
Neat and commodious, cheap and dry,
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