| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: large, where minds could expand, where the splendor of the Imperial
Court was so vividly reflected, and to be dropped suddenly into a
sphere of squalidly narrow ideas--was it not like a leap from Italy
into Greenland?--"Living here is not life!" said he to himself, as he
looked round the Methodistical room. The old Count, seeing his son's
dismay, went up to him, and taking his hand, led him to a window,
where there was still a gleam of daylight, and while the maid was
lighting the yellow tapers in the candle branches he tried to clear
away the clouds that the dreary place had brought to his brow.
"Listen, my boy," said he. "Old Bontems' widow is a frenzied bigot.
'When the devil is old--' you know! I see that the place goes against
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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 Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: of risk to Mr. Pinkerton. Well, you've got to put it that way
plainly, and see how you like the sound of it: my friend
Pinkerton is in danger of the New Jerusalem, I am in danger of
San Quentin; which risk do I propose to run?"
"That's an ugly way to put it," I objected, "and perhaps hardly
fair. There's right and wrong to be considered."
"Don't know the parties," replied Nares; "and I'm coming to
them, anyway. For it strikes me, when it came to smuggling
opium, you walked right up?"
"So I did," I said; "sick I am to have to say it!"
"All the same," continued Nares, "you went into the opium-
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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 In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: England in the morning I used to eat."
He turned up his eyes and his moustache, wiping the soup drippings from his
coat and waistcoat.
"Do they really eat so much?" asked Fraulein Stiegelauer. "Soup and
baker's bread and pig's flesh, and tea and coffee and stewed fruit, and
honey and eggs, and cold fish and kidneys, and hot fish and liver? All the
ladies eat, too, especially the ladies."
"Certainly. I myself have noticed it, when I was living in a hotel in
Leicester Square," cried the Herr Rat. "It was a good hotel, but they
could not make tea--now--"
"Ah, that's one thing I CAN do," said I, laughing brightly. "I can make
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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 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their
peevish, discontented cry. Before the barn door strutted the
gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a warrior and a fine
gentleman, clapping his burnished wings and crowing in the pride
and gladness of his heart, --sometimes tearing up the earth with
his feet, and then generously calling his ever-hungry family of
wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had
discovered.
The pedagogue's mouth watered as he looked upon this
sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring
mind's eye, he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
