| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: she seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating,
as if in her, too, there were something
never altogether at rest. He felt
that he knew pretty much what she
demanded in people and what she demanded
from life, and he wondered how she squared
Bartley. After ten years she must know him;
and however one took him, however much
one admired him, one had to admit that he
simply wouldn't square. He was a natural
force, certainly, but beyond that, Wilson felt,
Alexander's Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: room.
"Oh, this is my little home!" she said.
At the top and all round it was closed, only in the front it was open.
There was a beautiful shelf in the wall for the kippersol, and she
scrambled down again. She brought a great bunch of prickly pear, and stuck
it in a crevice before the door, and hung wild asparagus over it, till it
looked as though it grew there. No one could see that there was a room
there, for she left only a tiny opening, and hung a branch of feathery
asparagus over it. Then she crept in to see how it looked. There was a
glorious soft green light. Then she went out and picked some of those
purple little ground flowers--you know them--those that keep their faces
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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 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: fortunate partnership in this, that the parties retained their
mutual respect unlessened and separated with regret; but men's
affairs, like men, have their times of sickness, and by one of
these unaccountable variations, for hard upon ten years the
business was disappointing and the profits meagre. 'Inditing
drafts of German railways which will never get made': it is thus I
find Fleeming, not without a touch of bitterness, describe his
occupation. Even the patents hung fire at first. There was no
salary to rely on; children were coming and growing up; the
prospect was often anxious. In the days of his courtship, Fleeming
had written to Miss Austin a dissuasive picture of the trials of
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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 Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: westward - a fact which may be rigorously demonstrated by
figures. It is found that the sum total of the population of all
the United States has about tripled in the course of forty years.
But in the recent States adjacent to the Mississippi, the
population has increased thirty-one-fold, within the same space
of time. *n
[Footnote m: The following statements will suffice to show the
difference which exists between the commerce of the South and
that of the North: -
In 1829 the tonnage of all the merchant vessels belonging to
Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia (the four great Southern
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