| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes,
some of them far down into the valley, others high up towards the
summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud,
hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping
from one to another of the clouds that rested on the hills, and
thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed
almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly
regions. Earth was so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream to
look at it.
To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so
readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was
The Snow Image |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: required either patience or adroitness, and had not angled above
half an hour before I had completely 'satisfied the sentiment,' and
convinced myself of the truth of Izaak Walton's opinion, that
angling is something like poetry,--a man must be born to it. I
hooked myself instead of the fish; tangled my line in every tree;
lost my bait; broke my rod; until I gave up the attempt in despair,
and passed the day under the trees, reading old Izaak, satisfied
that it was his fascinating vein of honest simplicity and rural
feeling that had bewitched me, and not the passion for angling."
A NORWEGIAN HONEYMOON
"The best rose-bush, after all, is not that which has the fewest
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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 The Purse by Honore de Balzac: made. Adelaide said no more, and spared him a falsehood by rising
at the sound of a carriage stopping at the door. She went into
her own room, and returned carrying a pair of tall gilt
candlesticks with partly burnt wax candles, which she quickly
lighted, and without waiting for the bell to ring, she opened the
door of the outer room, where she set the lamp down. The sound of
a kiss given and received found an echo in Hippolyte's heart. The
young man's impatience to see the man who treated Adelaide with
so much familiarity was not immediately gratified; the newcomers
had a conversation, which he thought very long, in an undertone,
with the young girl.
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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: voice. She looked for nothing better than everlasting work--the
chafing detail of housework--and then a grave somewhere up the
hill among the blackberries and the pines.
But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a
small and silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far
from the meals she tended and the pans she scoured.
We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal
of downright humanity in that same. A bad, wicked dress-maker
had promised the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's
rail-way journey, and though the barefooted Georgy, who stood in
very wholesome awe of his sister, had scoured the woods on a pony
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