| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: fortune and status in the world.
These observations, though they have taken so great a space to
be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor
was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement.
"Have you got it?" he cried. "Have you got it?" And so
lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm
and sought to shake me.
I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang
along my blood. "Come, sir," said I. "You forget that I have not
yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please."
And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: Shakespear understood them, and not the vindictiveness of a stage Jew.
Gaiety of Genius
In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear's pessimism
as evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady. There
is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the
whole weight of the world's misery without blenching. There is a
laugh always ready to avenge its tears of discouragement. In the
lines which Mr Harris quotes only to declare that he can make nothing
of them, and to condemn them as out of character, Richard III,
immediately after pitying himself because
There is no creature loves me
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