| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: England for so long.
LADY CHILTERN. We were at school together, Mrs. Cheveley.
MRS. CHEVELEY [Superciliously.] Indeed? I have forgotten all about
my schooldays. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.
LADY CHILTERN. [Coldly.] I am not surprised!
MRS. CHEVELEY. [In her sweetest manner.] Do you know, I am quite
looking forward to meeting your clever husband, Lady Chiltern. Since
he has been at the Foreign Office, he has been so much talked of in
Vienna. They actually succeed in spelling his name right in the
newspapers. That in itself is fame, on the continent.
LADY CHILTERN. I hardly think there will be much in common between
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: "I am afraid," said he to the artist, "that your imagination
prevails over your skill, and that you now tell me rather what you
wish than what you know. Every animal has his element assigned
him; the birds have the air, and man and beasts the earth." "So,"
replied the mechanist, "fishes have the water, in which yet beasts
can swim by nature and man by art. He that can swim needs not
despair to fly; to swim is to fly in a grosser fluid, and to fly is
to swim in a subtler. We are only to proportion our power of
resistance to the different density of matter through which we are
to pass. You will be necessarily up-borne by the air if you can
renew any impulse upon it faster than the air can recede from the
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