| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum: some tangerines. "We've found 'most ev'ry kind of fruit but peaches,"
he said to himself, "so I guess there are peaches here, too, if I can
find the trees."
He searched here and there, paying no attention to his way, until he
found that the trees surrounding him bore only nuts. He put some
walnuts in his pockets and kept on searching, and at last--right among
the nut trees--he came upon one solitary peach tree. It was a
graceful, beautiful tree, but although it was thickly leaved, it bore
no fruit except one large, splendid peach, rosy-cheeked and fuzzy and
just right to eat.
In his heart he doubted this statement, for this was a solitary peach
The Lost Princess of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: "He turned his face towards me with a slight contraction of his bushy,
black eyebrows; this characteristic shade of expression in him meant
as much as the most jubilant smile on a Southern face.
" 'You look just as gloomy as you did that day when the news came of
the failure of that bookseller whose sharpness you admired so much,
though you were one of his victims.'
" 'One of his victims?' he repeated, with a look of astonishment.
" 'Yes. Did you not refuse to accept composition at the meeting of
creditors until he undertook privately to pay you your debt in full;
and did he not give you bills accepted by the insolvent firm; and
then, when he set up in business again, did he not pay you the
Gobseck |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself,
as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the
melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the
first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom
pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was
unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic,
sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest
natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the
scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape
features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant
eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white
The Fall of the House of Usher |
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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion
That reply, which Mr Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold:
first, that Shakespear was, in his attitude towards earls, a
sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespear's sexual
constitution is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility
to the normal impulse shewn in the whole mass of his writings. This
latter is the really conclusive reply. In the case of Michel Angelo,
for instance, one must admit that if his works are set beside those of
Titian or Paul Veronese, it is impossible not to be struck by the
absence in the Florentine of that susceptibility to feminine charm
which pervades the pictures of the Venetians. But, as Mr Harris
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