| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: that broom like a man in a rage; he will make each hair of it stand
on-end as though it were on your own bristling scalp; he will make it
the interpreter between the secret poem of his imagination and the
poem that shall have its birth in yours. After terrifying you by the
aspect of that broom, to-morrow he will draw another, and lying by it
a cat, asleep, but mysterious in its sleep, shall tell you that this
broom is that on which the wife of a German cobbler rides off to the
Sabbath on the Brocken. Or it will be a quite harmless broom, on which
he will hang the coat of a clerk in the Treasury. Decamps had in his
brush what Paganini had in his bow--a magnetically communicative
power.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: All this my dear, unfortunate patron has endured without help or
countenance. Your own best word, my lord, was only gratitude. Oh,
but he was your son, too! He had no other father. He was hated in
the country, God knows how unjustly. He had a loveless marriage.
He stood on all hands without affection or support - dear,
generous, ill-fated, noble heart!"
"Your tears do you much honour and me much shame," says my lord,
with a palsied trembling. "But you do me some injustice. Henry
has been ever dear to me, very dear. James (I do not deny it, Mr.
Mackellar), James is perhaps dearer; you have not seen my James in
quite a favourable light; he has suffered under his misfortunes;
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