| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Princess of Parms by Edgar Rice Burroughs: as the flames ate away her wooden parts and diminished the
weight upon her. Ascending to the roof of the building I
watched her for hours, until finally she was lost in the dim
vistas of the distance. The sight was awe-inspiring in the
extreme as one contemplated this mighty floating funeral pyre,
drifting unguided and unmanned through the lonely wastes of
the Martian heavens; a derelict of death and destruction,
typifying the life story of these strange and ferocious
creatures into whose unfriendly hands fate had carried it.
Much depressed, and, to me, unaccountably so, I slowly
descended to the street. The scene I had witnessed seemed
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: think, that her colleague was able to triumph over statues.
"Sarrasine started for Italy in 1758. On the journey his ardent
imagination took fire beneath a sky of copper and at the sight of the
marvelous monuments with which the fatherland of the arts is strewn.
He admired the statues, the frescoes, the pictures; and, fired with a
spirit of emulation, he went on to Rome, burning to inscribe his name
between the names of Michelangelo and Bouchardon. At first, therefore,
he divided his time between his studio work and examination of the
works of art which abound in Rome. He had already passed a fortnight
in the ecstatic state into which all youthful imaginations fall at the
sight of the queen of ruins, when he happened one evening to enter the
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