| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: deliberation. "We might have been - becalmed in here - for days.
And hospitality. I am invited to stay - on board here."
The answer to this information was a loud ejaculation of distress.
Jasper thought anxiously: "Why, the fellow's nerve's gone to
pieces;" and with an awkward uneasiness of a new sort, looked
intently at the brig. The thought that he was parted from her -
for the first time since they came together - shook the apparently
careless fortitude of his character to its very foundations, which
were deep. All that time neither Heemskirk nor even his inky
shadow had stirred in the least.
"I am going to send a boat's crew and an officer on board your
 'Twixt Land & Sea |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: those days a superior physician was supposed to be cultivating magic;
while curing his patient he was drawing their horoscopes. Princes
protected the men of genius who were willing to reveal the future;
they lodged them in their palaces and pensioned them. The famous
Cornelius Agrippa, who came to France to become the physician of Henri
II., would not consent, as Nostradamus did, to predict the future, and
for this reason he was dismissed by Catherine de' Medici, who replaced
him with Cosmo Ruggiero. The men of science, who were superior to
their times, were therefore seldom appreciated; they simply inspired
an ignorant fear of occult sciences and their results.
Without being precisely one of the famous mathematicians, the man whom
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