| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: She jerked the baby's arm impatiently. He fell on his face,
roaring. With a second jerk she pulled him to his feet, and they
went on. With the obstinacy of his order, he protested against
being dragged in a chosen direction. He made heroic endeavors to
keep on his legs, denounce his sister and consume a bit of orange
peeling which he chewed between the times of his infantile
orations.
As the sullen-eyed man, followed by the blood-covered boy,
drew near, the little girl burst into reproachful cries.
"Ah, Jimmie, youse bin fightin' agin."
The urchin swelled disdainfully.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: with his family to France.
Monsieur and Madame d'Aubrion, of the house of d'Aubrion de Buch, a
family of southern France, whose last /captal/, or chief, died before
1789, were now reduced to an income of about twenty thousand francs,
and they possessed an ugly daughter whom the mother was resolved to
marry without a /dot/,--the family fortune being scarcely sufficient
for the demands of her own life in Paris. This was an enterprise whose
success might have seemed problematical to most men of the world, in
spite of the cleverness with which such men credit a fashionable
woman; in fact, Madame d'Aubrion herself, when she looked at her
daughter, almost despaired of getting rid of her to any one, even to a
Eugenie Grandet |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: their colours and the service of their king, and ought not to be
credited again; but they added, that for shooting rough-cast slugs
they must excuse them, as things stood with them at that time.
About this time, a porter in a soldier's habit got through the
enemy's leaguer, and passing their out-guards in the dark, got into
the town, and brought letters from London, assuring the Royalists
that there were so many strong parties up in arms for the king, and
in so many places, that they would be very suddenly relieved. This
they caused to be read to the soldiers to encourage them; and
particularly it related to the rising of the Earl of Holland, and
the Duke of Buckingham, who with 500 horse were gotten together in
|
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 Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum: for she is wicked and fierce, and may not allow you to destroy her.
Keep to the West, where the sun sets, and you cannot fail to find her."
They thanked him and bade him good-bye, and turned toward the West,
walking over fields of soft grass dotted here and there with daisies
and buttercups. Dorothy still wore the pretty silk dress she had put on
in the palace, but now, to her surprise, she found it was no longer green,
but pure white. The ribbon around Toto's neck had also lost its green
color and was as white as Dorothy's dress.
The Emerald City was soon left far behind. As they advanced
the ground became rougher and hillier, for there were no farms nor
houses in this country of the West, and the ground was untilled.
The Wizard of Oz |
