The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: aristocracy was the advantage of trade, and everything was knit
together in a richness of pattern that it was good to follow with
one's finger-tips. It was a comfort to him to be thus assured that
there were no symptoms of a drop. What did the sounder, as she
called it, nimbly worked, do but keep the ball going?
What it came to therefore for Mr. Mudge was that all enjoyments
were, as might be said, inter-related, and that the more people had
the more they wanted to have. The more flirtations, as he might
roughly express it, the more cheese and pickles. He had even in
his own small way been dimly struck with the linked sweetness
connecting the tender passion with cheap champagne, or perhaps 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 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: that this was the spot into which all the ghouls of the waking
world cast the refuse of their feastings; and that if he but had
good luck he might stumble upon that mighty crag taller even than
Throk's peaks which marks the edge of their domain. Showers of
bones would tell him where to look, and once found he could call
to a ghoul to let down a ladder; for strange to say, he had a
very singular link with these terrible creatures.
A man he had
known in Boston - a painter of strange pictures with a secret
studio in an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard - had
actually made friends with the ghouls and had taught him to understand
 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |