| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: discourses, the views he had set forth in the former lectures on the
Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell. His strange doctrine responded to the
sympathies of the time, and gratified the immoderate love of the
marvelous, which haunts the mind of man in every age. This effort of
man to clutch the infinite, which for ever slips through his
ineffectual grasp, this last tourney of thought against thought, was a
task worthy of an assembly where the most stupendous human imagination
ever known, perhaps, at that moment shone.
The Doctor began by summing up in a mild and even tone the principal
points he had so far established:
"No intellect was the exact counterpart of another. Had man any right
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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 Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Priscilla, warmer than her name,
And shriller than the sound of saws,
Pursued Llewellyn once too far,
Not knowing quite the man he was.
The more she said, the fiercer clung
The stinging garment of his wrath;
And this was all before the day
When Time tossed roses in his path.
Before the roses ever came
Llewellyn had already risen.
The roses may have ruined him,
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