| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: to me, it's like so much warm rain: but then it turns to hail over
my head, and knocks me about like small shot."
"That hail will never come any more," said the strange lady. "I
have told you before what it was. It was your mother's tears,
those which she shed when she prayed for you by her bedside; but
your cold heart froze it into hail. But she is gone to heaven now,
and will weep no more for her graceless son."
Then Grimes was silent awhile; and then he looked very sad.
"So my old mother's gone, and I never there to speak to her! Ah! a
good woman she was, and might have been a happy one, in her little
school there in Vendale, if it hadn't been for me and my bad ways."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they
question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear
to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in
interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social,
literary, or political prejudices, to do away with the need of having
opinions, just as they adapt their conscience to the standard of the
Code or the Tribunal of Commerce. Having started early to become men
of note, they turn into mediocrities, and crawl over the high places
of the world. So, too, their faces present the harsh pallor, the
deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished eyes, and garrulous, sensual
mouths, in which the observer recognizes the symptoms of the
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: the Bakerian Lecture for the year. He placed a bar of iron in a coil
of wire, and lifting the bar into the direction of the dipping needle,
he excited by this action a current in the coil. On reversing the
bar, a current in the opposite direction rushed through the wire.
The same effect was produced when, on holding the helix in the line
of dip, a bar of iron was thrust into it. Here, however, the earth
acted on the coil through the intermediation of the bar of iron.
He abandoned the bar and simply set a copper plate spinning in a
horizontal plane; he knew that the earth's lines of magnetic force
then crossed the plate at an angle of about 70degrees. When the plate
spun round, the lines of force were intersected and induced currents
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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 Mother by Owen Wister: the increased dividend turned out a mistake, I should have made money.
But Philippi Sewers were threatened; Pasteurised Feeders had been numb
since June; Pollyopolis Heat, Light, Power, Paving, Pressing, and Packing
was going to pass its quarterly dividend; and Standard Egg had gone down
from 63 to 7 1/8. My million dollars on paper now was worth in reality
less than a quarter of that sum, and although we could still make both
ends meet fairly well in some place where you wouldn't want to live, like
Philadelphia, in New York we should drop into a pinched and dwarfed
obscurity."
"I must say now, and I shall never forget, that Ethel during these gloomy
weeks behaved much better than I did. The grayer the outlook became, the
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