| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: In one of the apartments of the Province House
there was long preserved an ancient picture, the frame of which
was as black as ebony, and the canvas itself so dark with age,
damp, and smoke, that not a touch of the painter's art could be
discerned. Time had thrown an impenetrable veil over it, and left
to tradition and fable and conjecture to say what had once been
there portrayed. During the rule of many successive governors, it
had hung, by prescriptive and undisputed right, over the
mantel-piece of the same chamber; and it still kept its place
when Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson assumed the administration of
the province, on the departure of Sir Francis Bernard.
Twice Told Tales |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: have absolutely no respect for dyed hair. [LORD AUGUSTUS looks
round angrily.]
CECIL GRAHAM. Mrs. Erlynne has a very great respect for dear
Tuppy.
DUMBY. Then Mrs. Erlynne sets an admirable example to the rest of
her sex. It is perfectly brutal the way most women nowadays behave
to men who are not their husbands.
LORD WINDERMERE. Dumby, you are ridiculous, and Cecil, you let
your tongue run away with you. You must leave Mrs. Erlynne alone.
You don't really know anything about her, and you're always talking
scandal against her.
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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 Ion by Plato: winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been
inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when
he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter
his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the
actions of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not
speak of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that
to which the Muse impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of
them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral strains,
another epic or iambic verses--and he who is good at one is not good at any
other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power
divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak
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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 Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: Marcas erred in the same way, but for our benefit only. Silence in all
its majesty is to be found only in the savage. There is never a
criminal who, though he might let his secrets fall with his head into
the basket of sawdust does not feel the purely social impulse to tell
them to somebody.
Nay, I am wrong. We have seen one Iroquois of the Faubourg Saint-
Marceau who raised the Parisian to the level of the natural savage--a
republican, a conspirator, a Frenchman, an old man, who outdid all we
have heard of Negro determination, and all that Cooper tells us of the
tenacity and coolness of the Redskins under defeat. Morey, the
Guatimozin of the "Mountain," preserved an attitude unparalleled in
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