| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: with the borrowed grace of idiom that marked the best colloquial,
the best anecdotic, moments of his friends themselves. "Where in
the world do you suppose I should get three louis, du train dont
vous allez?"
"I thought you worked - wrote things. Don't they pay you?"
"Not a penny."
"Are you such a fool as to work for nothing?"
"You ought surely to know that."
Mrs. Moreen stared, then she coloured a little. Pemberton saw she
had quite forgotten the terms - if "terms" they could be called -
that he had ended by accepting from herself; they had burdened her
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: A more prodigious upstart among states
Than I was among men, and so shall be
Till they are told and told, and told again;
For men are children, waiting to be told,
And most of them are children all their lives.
The good God in his wisdom had them so,
That now and then a madman or a seer
May shake them out of their complacency
And shame them into deeds. The major file
See only what their fathers may have seen,
Or may have said they saw when they saw nothing.
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: death suggested skeletons--and so, by a logical process
the conversation melted out of one of these subjects
and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up
Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he
had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.
When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri,
a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad
countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day,
and without removing his hands from the depths
of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin
of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged
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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 Euthydemus by Plato: he was in deep water, and therefore, as I wanted to give him a respite lest
he should be disheartened, I said to him consolingly: You must not be
surprised, Cleinias, at the singularity of their mode of speech: this I
say because you may not understand what the two strangers are doing with
you; they are only initiating you after the manner of the Corybantes in the
mysteries; and this answers to the enthronement, which, if you have ever
been initiated, is, as you will know, accompanied by dancing and sport; and
now they are just prancing and dancing about you, and will next proceed to
initiate you; imagine then that you have gone through the first part of the
sophistical ritual, which, as Prodicus says, begins with initiation into
the correct use of terms. The two foreign gentlemen, perceiving that you
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