| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: straight out over her head, and her cambric nightgown with a high
collar and long sleeves, and the hump on her nose where her
brother Willie had hit her in childhood with a baseball bat, the
surer I was that somebody had made a mistake--likely the man.
Now there's two ways to handle a situation like that: one of them
is to rouse the house--and many a good sanatorium has been hurt
by a scandal and killed by a divorce; the other way is to take
one strong man who can hold his tongue, find the guilty person,
and send him a fake telegram the next morning that his mother is
sick. I've done that more than once.
I sat down on the side of the bed and put on my slippers.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Common Sense by Thomas Paine: into that of ENGLISHMEN. And by a just parity of reasoning,
all Europeans meeting in America, or any other quarter of the globe,
are COUNTRYMEN; for England, Holland, Germany, or Sweden, when compared
with the whole, stand in the same places on the larger scale,
which the divisions of street, town, and county do on the smaller ones;
distinctions too limited for continental minds. Not one third of
the inhabitants, even of this province, are of English descent.
Wherefore I reprobate the phrase of parent or mother country applied
to England only, as being false, selfish, narrow and ungenerous.
But admitting, that we were all of English descent, what does
it amount to? Nothing. Britain, being now an open enemy,
Common Sense |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: press," to be the fashion, and the journal in question must have
felt it had passed too long for a mere country cousin. Corvick had
no hand, I knew, for the big brush of the correspondent, but that
was his brother-in-law's affair, and the fact that a particular
task was not in his line was apt to be with himself exactly a
reason for accepting it. He was prepared to out-Herod the
metropolitan press; he took solemn precautions against
priggishness, he exquisitely outraged taste. Nobody ever knew it -
that offended principle was all his own. In addition to his
expenses he was to be conveniently paid, and I found myself able to
help him, for the usual fat book, to a plausible arrangement with
|
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 The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: flashes of the mind?"
"No," said Oberon, tossing the manuscripts on the table. "I find
no traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of
fire. My treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My
picture, painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents
nothing but a faded and indistinguishable surface. I have been
eloquent and poetical and humorous in a dream,--and behold! it is
all nonsense, now that I am awake."
My friend now threw sticks of wood and dry chips upon the fire,
and seeing it blaze like Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, seized the
champagne bottle, and drank two or three brimming bumpers,
The Snow Image |
