| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: a man of his vast wealth to live in.
As I have said above, it had already been rumored in the valley
that Mr. Gathergold had turned out to be the prophetic personage
so long and vainly looked for, and that his visage was the
perfect and undeniable similitude of the Great Stone Face. People
were the more ready to believe that this must needs be the fact,
when they beheld the splendid edifice that rose, as if by
enchantment, on the site of his father's old weatherbeaten
farm-house. The exterior was of marble, so dazzlingly white that
it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in the
sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his
 The Snow Image |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: Source of happiness;
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
Upon the rocks:
At times at work without compulsion -
This would be delightful;
At times plucking dulse from the rocks
At times at fishing."
So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve
hundred years before. And so might I have sung of Earraid.
And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and
sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were
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