| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: relieved. She seemed to dread a complaint from one of them more than
the loss of her soul. Everything in her children did honor to their
mother's training. Their threefold life, seemingly one life, called up
vague, fond thoughts; it was like a vision of the dreamed-of bliss of
a better world. And the three, so attuned to each other, lived in
truth such a life as one might picture for them at first sight--the
ordered, simple, and regular life best suited for a child's education.
Both children rose an hour after daybreak and repeated a short prayer,
a habit learned in their babyhood. For seven years the sincere
petition had been put up every morning on their mother's bed, and
begun and ended by a kiss. Then the two brothers went through their
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: gold, you are not gold?
Very true.
And so Chaeredemus, he said, being other than a father, is not a father?
I suppose that he is not a father, I replied.
For if, said Euthydemus, taking up the argument, Chaeredemus is a father,
then Sophroniscus, being other than a father, is not a father; and you,
Socrates, are without a father.
Ctesippus, here taking up the argument, said: And is not your father in
the same case, for he is other than my father?
Assuredly not, said Euthydemus.
Then he is the same?
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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 Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a woman and
some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at
one place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that
we can summon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur
Hugo thinks they ceased to steer the corvette while the gun
was loose? Of the chapter in which Lantenac and Halmalho are
alone together in the boat, the less said the better; of
course, if there were nothing else, they would have been
swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's
harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes
of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet
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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 American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: A colored gentleman who insisted on getting me pie when I wanted
something else, demanded information about India. I gave him
some facts about wages.
"Oh, hell!" said he, cheerfully, "that wouldn't keep me in cigars
for a month."
Then he fawned on me for a ten-cent piece. Later he took it upon
himself to pity the natives of India. "Heathens," he called
them--this woolly one, whose race has been the butt of every
comedy on the native stage since the beginning. And I turned and
saw by the head upon his shoulders that he was a Yoruba man, if
there be any truth in ethnological castes. He did his thinking
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