| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: Will crush her pretty maiden fancies dead
In iron gauntlets: break the council up.'
But when the council broke, I rose and past
Through the wild woods that hung about the town;
Found a still place, and plucked her likeness out;
Laid it on flowers, and watched it lying bathed
In the green gleam of dewy-tasselled trees:
What were those fancies? wherefore break her troth?
Proud looked the lips: but while I meditated
A wind arose and rushed upon the South,
And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: P. Feliu said he knew that brand: Old-man Preaulx, of
Belle-Isle, who kept a sort of dairy at Last Island during the
summer season, used to mark all his cows that way. Strange!
But, as they worked on, they began to see stranger things,--white
dead faces and dead hands, which did not look like the hands or
the faces of drowned sailors: the ebb was beginning to run
strongly, and these were passing out with it on the other side of
the mouth of the bayou;--perhaps they had been washed into the
marsh during the night, when the great rush of the sea came.
Then the three men left the water, and retired to higher ground
to scan the furrowed Gulf;--their practiced eyes began to search
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