| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini: his drooping hopes, pointing as it did to the general favouring of
Monmouth that was toward. He grew less despondent on the score of the
Duke's possible ultimate success, and he came to hope that the efforts
he went to exert would not be fruitless.
But rude were the disappointments that awaited him in town. London,
like the rest of the country, was not ready. There were not wanting men
who favoured Monmouth; but no rising had been organized, and the Duke's
partisans were not disposed to rashness.
Wilding lodged at Covent Garden, in a house recommended to him by
Colonel Danvers, and there - an outlaw himself - he threw himself with
a will into his task. He heard of the burning of Monmouth's Declaration
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever
happens to oneself happens to another.'
Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of
Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be
realised by it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to Him. He
was the first to conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his
time there had been gods and men, and, feeling through the
mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had been made incarnate,
he calls himself the Son of the one or the Son of the other,
according to his mood. More than any one else in history he wakes
in us that temper of wonder to which romance always appeals. There
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