| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: Don't forget about to-morrow. Good-bye."
As he left the room, Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began
to think. Certainly few people had ever interested him so much
as Dorian Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else
caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy.
He was pleased by it. It made him a more interesting study.
He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science,
but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him
trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself,
as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human life--that appeared
to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there
 The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: Moreover, he has all the things which go to make up wealth, slaves and
horses innumerable, gold and silver without end.
I saw that he was inclined to expatiate on the riches of the man; so I
asked him, Well, Erasistratus, and what sort of character does he bear in
Sicily?
ERASISTRATUS: He is esteemed to be, and really is, the wickedest of all
the Sicilians and Italians, and even more wicked than he is rich; indeed,
if you were to ask any Sicilian whom he thought to be the worst and the
richest of mankind, you would never hear any one else named.
I reflected that we were speaking, not of trivial matters, but about wealth
and virtue, which are deemed to be of the greatest moment, and I asked
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