| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.
Cousin Nancy
Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them--
The barren New England hills--
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: strength, she laboured to make it impossible that any other wife
should have had more perfect tenderness. She had been _forced_ to
vex him by that one denial. Godfrey was not insensible to her
loving effort, and did Nancy no injustice as to the motives of her
obstinacy. It was impossible to have lived with her fifteen years
and not be aware that an unselfish clinging to the right, and a
sincerity clear as the flower-born dew, were her main
characteristics; indeed, Godfrey felt this so strongly, that his own
more wavering nature, too averse to facing difficulty to be
unvaryingly simple and truthful, was kept in a certain awe of this
gentle wife who watched his looks with a yearning to obey them. It
Silas Marner |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: But in the heart of Hermas there was no song, no bloom, no
light--only speechless anguish, and a certain fearful looking-for
of desolation.
He was like a man in a nightmare. He saw the shapeless
terror that was moving toward him, but he was impotent to stay
or to escape it. He had done all that he could. There was
nothing left but to wait.
He paced to and fro, now hurrying to the boy's bed as if
he could not bear to be away from it, now turning back as if
he could not endure to be near it. The people of the house,
even Athenais, feared to speak to him, there was something so
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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 Protagoras by Plato: position?'--how would you answer him?
I could not help acknowledging the truth of what he said, Socrates.
Well then, Protagoras, we will assume this; and now supposing that he
proceeded to say further, 'Then holiness is not of the nature of justice,
nor justice of the nature of holiness, but of the nature of unholiness; and
holiness is of the nature of the not just, and therefore of the unjust, and
the unjust is the unholy': how shall we answer him? I should certainly
answer him on my own behalf that justice is holy, and that holiness is
just; and I would say in like manner on your behalf also, if you would
allow me, that justice is either the same with holiness, or very nearly the
same; and above all I would assert that justice is like holiness and
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