| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: carried his desires along with it as he dreamed over its fleeting
surface; the wind, as it ran over innumerable tree-tops, hailed him
with encouraging words; branches beckoned downward; the open road,
as it shouldered round the angles and went turning and vanishing
fast and faster down the valley, tortured him with its
solicitations. He spent long whiles on the eminence, looking down
the rivershed and abroad on the fat lowlands, and watched the
clouds that travelled forth upon the sluggish wind and trailed
their purple shadows on the plain; or he would linger by the
wayside, and follow the carriages with his eyes as they rattled
downward by the river. It did not matter what it was; everything
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: falconer, who was doubtless a personage of no small social rank.
Vesalius was well off in worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said,
of good living and of luxury; inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," and to sink more and more into
the mere worldling, unless some shock should awake him from his
lethargy.
And the awakening shock did come. After eight years of court life,
he resolved, early in the year 1564, to go on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem.
The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery
and contradiction. The common story was that he had opened a corpse
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