The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas: clung about the doorway of this uninhabited house, mounting as
high as the first story.
I looked at the house so long that I began by thinking of it as
mine, so perfectly did it embody the dream that I was dreaming; I
saw Marguerite and myself there, by day in the little wood that
covered the hillside, in the evening seated on the grass, and I
asked myself if earthly creatures had ever been so happy as we
should be.
"What a pretty house!" Marguerite said to me, as she followed the
direction of my gaze and perhaps of my thought.
"Where?" asked Prudence.
 Camille |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: heard of the fish-preserves in the Nile and in the ponds of the Great King,
and of the nurseries of geese and cranes in Thessaly. These suggest a new
division into the rearing or management of land-herds and of water-herds:--
I need not say with which the king is concerned. And land-herds may be
divided into walking and flying; and every idiot knows that the political
animal is a pedestrian. At this point we may take a longer or a shorter
road, and as we are already near the end, I see no harm in taking the
longer, which is the way of mesotomy, and accords with the principle which
we were laying down. The tame, walking, herding animal, may be divided
into two classes--the horned and the hornless, and the king is concerned
with the hornless; and these again may be subdivided into animals having or
 Statesman |