| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: The man Flammonde saw none of that,
And what he saw we wondered at --
That none of us, in her distress,
Could hide or find our littleness.
There was a boy that all agreed
Had shut within him the rare seed
Of learning. We could understand,
But none of us could lift a hand.
The man Flammonde appraised the youth,
And told a few of us the truth;
And thereby, for a little gold,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: noise; he sat up, and the deep silence around allowed him to
distinguish the alternative accents of a respiration whose savage
energy could not belong to a human creature.
A profound terror, increased still further by the darkness, the
silence, and his waking images, froze his heart within him. He almost
felt his hair stand on end, when by straining his eyes to their utmost
he perceived through the shadow two faint yellow lights. At first he
attributed these lights to the reflections of his own pupils, but soon
the vivid brilliance of the night aided him gradually to distinguish
the objects around him in the cave, and he beheld a huge animal lying
but two steps from him. Was it a lion, a tiger, or a crocodile?
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