| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Whirligigs by O. Henry: faces ranged from the clear olive of the pure-blood Span-
iards down through the yellow and brown shades of the
Mestizos to the coal-black Carib and the Jamaica Negro.
Scattered among them were little groups of Indians with
faces like stone idols, wrapped in gaudy fibre-woven
blankets -- Indians down from the mountain states of
Zamora and Los Andes and Miranda to trade their gold
dust in the coast towns.
The spell cast upon these denizens of the interior
fastnesses was remarkable. They sat in petrified ecstasy,
conspicuous among the excitable Macutians, who wildly
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: doubt, some woman's gourd was too small, or else she
had forgotten her gourd; but be that as it may, she
bent two great leaves together, pinning the seams with
twigs, and carried home a bigger quantity of berries
than could have been contained in the largest gourd.
So far we got, and no farther, in the transportation of
supplies during the years I lived with the Folk. It
never entered anybody's head to weave a basket out of
willow-withes. Sometimes the men and women tied tough
vines about the bundles of ferns and branches that they
carried to the caves to sleep upon. Possibly in ten or
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: banderillos in every direction like a spray, and receiving their
maddening darts in his neck as they dodge and fly - oh, but it's a
lively spectacle, and brings down the house! Ah, you should hear
the thundering roar that goes up when the game is at its wildest
and brilliant things are done!
"Oh, that first bull, that day, was great! From the moment the
spirit of war rose to flood-tide in him and he got down to his
work, he began to do wonders. He tore his way through his
persecutors, flinging one of them clear over the parapet; he bowled
a horse and his rider down, and plunged straight for the next, got
home with his horns, wounding both horse and man; on again, here
|
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his
native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the
groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. And
poor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike the feeling
of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness,
from the face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him that the
Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the
prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had
taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and
needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to
bitterness. The little light he possessed spread its beams so
Silas Marner |
