| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: And great dust columns of the common way
Between them grew and grew:
And he and she for evermore might yearn,
But to the spring the rivulets not return
Nor to the bosom comes the child again.
And he (O may we fancy so!),
He, feeling time forever flow
And flowing bear him forth and far away
From that dear ingle where his life began
And all his treasure lay -
He, waxing into man,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: labour, and study; and the dilettante (and it is for dilettanti,
like myself, that I principally write) must be content to tread in
the tracks of greater men who have preceded him, and accept at
second or third hand their foregone conclusions.
But this is most unsatisfactory; for in giving up discovery, one
gives up one of the highest enjoyments of Natural History. There
is a mysterious delight in the discovery of a new species, akin to
that of seeing for the first time, in their native haunts, plants
or animals of which one has till then only read. Some, surely, who
read these pages have experienced that latter delight; and, though
they might find it hard to define whence the pleasure arose, know
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