| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: and that is one of them. Numbers and sizes and distances are so
great, here, that we have to be made so we can FEEL them - our old
ways of counting and measuring and ciphering wouldn't ever give us
an idea of them, but would only confuse us and oppress us and make
our heads ache."
After some more talk about this, I says: "Sandy, I notice that I
hardly ever see a white angel; where I run across one white angel,
I strike as many as a hundred million copper-colored ones - people
that can't speak English. How is that?"
"Well, you will find it the same in any State or Territory of the
American corner of heaven you choose to go to. I have shot along,
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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 Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: was his terror of the mountain. A little away above our
nook, the azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased.
Dwarf pines not big enough to be Christmas trees, grew thinly
among loose stone and gravel scaurs. Here and there a big
boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused there till
the next rain in his long slide down the mountain. There was
here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where
you trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and
appealing became Chuchu's terror. He was an excellent master
of that composite language in which dogs communicate with
men, and he would assure me, on his honour, that there was
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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 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: prove what she felt.
"My dearest Lizzy will, I am sure, be incapable of triumphing in
her better judgement, at my expense, when I confess myself to
have been entirely deceived in Miss Bingley's regard for me.
But, my dear sister, though the event has proved you right, do
not think me obstinate if I still assert that, considering what her
behaviour was, my confidence was as natural as your suspicion.
I do not at all comprehend her reason for wishing to be intimate
with me; but if the same circumstances were to happen again, I
am sure I should be deceived again. Caroline did not return my
visit till yesterday; and not a note, not a line, did I receive in the
Pride and Prejudice |
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 Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: spots of the forest, and others, of still richer blush, which the
colonists had reared from English seed. O, people of the Golden
Age, the chief of your husbandry was to raise flowers!
But what was the wild throng that stood hand in hand about the
Maypole? It could not be that the fauns and nymphs, when driven
from their classic groves and homes of ancient fable, had sought
refuge, as all the persecuted did, in the fresh woods of the
West. These were Gothic monsters, though perhaps of Grecian
ancestry. On the shoulders of a comely youth uprose the head and
branching antlers of a stag; a second, human in all other points,
had the grim visage of a wolf; a third, still with the trunk and
Twice Told Tales |
