| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: muttered.
"Is it ever, quite, I wonder?" she mused. He made no answer and
they lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel
of communication.
It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
"Don't they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of
tender apprehensiveness, "that the early Christians, instead of
pulling down the heathen temples--the temples of the unclean gods--
purified them by turning them to their own uses? I've always
thought one might do that with one's actions--the actions one
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: "There's Marty South Sitting up with the coachman," said he,
discerning her by her dress.
"Ah, poor Marty! I must ask her to come to see me this very
evening. How does she happen to be riding there?"
"I don't know. It is very singular."
Thus these people with converging destinies went along the road
together, till Winterborne, leaving the track of the carriage,
turned into Little Hintock, where almost the first house was the
timber-merchant's. Pencils of dancing light streamed out of the
windows sufficiently to show the white laurestinus flowers, and
glance over the polished leaves of laurel. The interior of the
The Woodlanders |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: "This," said he, "cannot hold; but a change,
a total change of sentiments--No, no, do not desire it;
for when the romantic refinements of a young mind
are obliged to give way, how frequently are they
succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too
dangerous! I speak from experience. I once knew a lady
who in temper and mind greatly resembled your sister,
who thought and judged like her, but who from an inforced
change--from a series of unfortunate circumstances"--
Here he stopt suddenly; appeared to think that he had said
too much, and by his countenance gave rise to conjectures,
Sense and Sensibility |
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 Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt,
the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid
the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary
commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in
itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or
disturbed me. I continued the story:
"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the
door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the
maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly
and prodigious demeanour, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in
guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon
The Fall of the House of Usher |
