| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.
And half the alchemists were of their tribe.
When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might
have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive
engine. But they could see nothing of the sort. They were not
yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all
too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For
a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this
new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their
first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited
for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine
The Last War: A World Set Free |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Whether it was pity or regret that saddened her expression
as she gazed toward the southern heavens where she had
watched the lights of his flier disappear the previous night,
it would be difficult to say.
So, too, is it impossible to conjecture just what her
emotions may have been as she discerned the lights of
a flier speeding rapidly out of the distance from that
very direction, as though impelled toward her garden
by the very intensity of the princess' thoughts.
She saw it circle lower above the palace until she was
positive that it but hovered in preparation for a landing.
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
