The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: So Woman at her best:
Her eyes are bright with visions and with dreams
That triumph over time;
Her plumed thought, wing for wing, is mate with
his.
II
The world rolls on from dream to dream,
And 'neath the vast impersonal revenges of its
going,
Crushed fools that cried defeat
Lie dead amid the dust they prophesied--
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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 Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: of the Jesuits, had been patent and potent causes of much of the
misrule and misery of Louis XIV.'s and XV.'s reigns; and that with
all these heavy counts against them, their morality was not such as
to make other men more moral; and was not--at least among the
hierarchy--improving, or likely to improve. To a Mazarin, a De
Retz, a Richelieu (questionable men enough) had succeeded a Dubois,
a Rohan, a Lomenie de Brienne, a Maury, a Talleyrand; and at the
revolution of 1789 thoughtful Frenchmen asked, once and for all,
what was to be done with a Church of which these were the
hierophants?
Whether these complaints affected the French Church as a "religious"
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