| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: be given which shall waken it. You think all existence lapses in as
quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away.
Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the
rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the
breakers boil at their base. But I tell you--and you may mark my
words--you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where
the whole of life's stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult,
foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points,
or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current-
-as I am now.
"I like this day; I like that sky of steel; I like the sternness and
 Jane Eyre |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Kenilworth by Walter Scott: medicine, which shall clear away all mortal diseases at once.
But cheer up, thou grave, learned, and most melancholy jackanape!
Hast thou not told me that a moderate portion of thy drug hath
mild effects, no ways ultimately dangerous to the human frame,
but which produces depression of spirits, nausea, headache, an
unwillingness to change of place--even such a state of temper as
would keep a bird from flying out of a cage were the door left
open?"
"I have said so, and it is true," said the alchemist. "This
effect will it produce, and the bird who partakes of it in such
proportion shall sit for a season drooping on her perch, without
 Kenilworth |