| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: Seasoning the earth with showers of silver brine,
Mingling my talk with tears, my grief with groans,
Poor wasting monuments of lasting moans.
'O night, thou furnace of foul-reeking smoke,
Let not the jealous day behold that face
Which underneath thy black all-hiding cloak
Immodesty lies martyr'd with disgrace!
Keep still possession of thy gloomy place,
That all the faults which in thy reign are made,
May likewise be sepulchred in thy shade!
'Make me not object to the tell-tale day!
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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 Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so
perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those
conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy
of the serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the power
to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of
the sense finer than we conceive, and hints of ancient
harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least is largely
irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty,
for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the
mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will
always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be
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