| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and
morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted
faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or
cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and
ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired
by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy
to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness
for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that,
amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing
to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,--
horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: her renounce the devil."
"She shall not renounce the devil," said the baron, "unless I please.
You are very ready with your undertakings. Will you undertake to make
her renounce the earl, who, I believe, is the devil incarnate?
Will you undertake that?"
"Will I undertake," said the friar, "to make Trent run westward,
or to make flame burn downward, or to make a tree grow with its head
in the earth and its root in the air?"
"So then," said the baron, "a girl's mind is as hard to change as nature and
the elements, and it is easier to make her renounce the devil than a lover.
Are you a match for the devil, and no match for a man?"
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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 Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: is eager to increase his means of satisfying these tastes more
completely. But life is slipping away, time is urgent - to what
is he to turn? The cultivation of the ground promises an almost
certain result to his exertions, but a slow one; men are not
enriched by it without patience and toil. Agriculture is
therefore only suited to those who have already large,
superfluous wealth, or to those whose penury bids them only seek
a bare subsistence. The choice of such a man as we have supposed
is soon made; he sells his plot of ground, leaves his dwelling,
and embarks in some hazardous but lucrative calling. Democratic
communities abound in men of this kind; and in proportion as the
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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 Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Mahars, marching from one great buried city to another
until we had passed far north of Amoz into a country
where I had never been. At each city we were vic-
torious, killing or capturing the Sagoths and driving the
Mahars further away.
I noticed that they always fled toward the north. The
Sagoth prisoners we usually found quite ready to trans-
fer their allegiance to us, for they are little more than
brutes, and when they found that we could fill their
stomachs and give them plenty of fighting, they were
nothing loath to march with us against the next Mahar
Pellucidar |
