| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: "I beg your pardon, doctor, I really beg your pardon. Formerly I
should never have spoken as I have just done; so many misfortunes
have happened to me, that I sometimes do not know what I am saying.
I understand you; you fear the emotion. I will wait as long
as you like, but I swear to you that it would not have harmed
me to see my daughter. I have been seeing her; I have not
taken my eyes from her since yesterday evening. Do you know?
If she were brought to me now, I should talk to her very gently.
That is all. Is it not quite natural that I should desire to see
my daughter, who has been brought to me expressly from Montfermeil?
I am not angry. I know well that I am about to be happy. All night
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: whether or no it was Gravener's directness that begot my own, I
seem to recall that in some turn taken by our talk he almost
imposed it on me as an act of decorum to ask if Miss Anvoy had also
by chance expectations from her aunt. My enquiry drew out that
Lady Coxon, who was the oddest of women, would have in any
contingency to act under her late husband's will, which was odder
still, saddling her with a mass of queer obligations complicated
with queer loopholes. There were several dreary people, Coxon
cousins, old maids, to whom she would have more or less to
minister. Gravener laughed, without saying no, when I suggested
that the young lady might come in through a loophole; then
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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 Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my
fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney
baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We
should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our
forefathers' misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.
If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the
hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back,
step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one
after another as the States extended westward, until at length they
are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre - and
even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by
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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 War and the Future by H. G. Wells: distrust from passion or ambition. His friends went out after
love, after adventure, after power, after knowledge, after this
or that desire, and became men. But he noted merely that they
became fleshly, that effort strained them, that they were
sometimes angry or violent or heated. He could not but feel that
theirs were vulgar experiences, and he sought some finer exercise
for his exceptional quality. He pursued art or philosophy or
literature upon their more esoteric levels, and realised more and
more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about him,
and his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of the things
nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the
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