| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he WAS left behind--
because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let ourselves
be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current--on
everlasting foundations, as you say.
"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather
moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of
failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course
I meant to do the picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when
she began to stammer something about her poverty. I remember
getting off a prodigious phrase about the honour being MINE--oh,
I was princely, my dear Rickham! I was posing to myself like one
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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 Octopus by Frank Norris: "You mustn't talk like that, Mrs. Dyke," protested Presley,
"nonsense; you will live long enough to see the little tad
married." He tried to be cheerful. But he knew his words lacked
the ring of conviction. Death already overshadowed the face of
the engineer's mother. He felt that she spoke the truth, and as
he stood there speaking to her for the last time, his arm about
little Sidney's shoulder, he knew that he was seeing the
beginnings of the wreck of another family and that, like Hilda
Hooven, another baby girl was to be started in life, through no
fault of hers, fearfully handicapped, weighed down at the
threshold of existence with a load of disgrace. Hilda Hooven and
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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 The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: He layde his hand on mine and sayd:
"Be gone!" Ye ill no longer stayd.
But O ye wofull plyght in wh.
I'm now y-pight: I have ye itche!
The superstition that maladies can be cured by royal taction is
dead, but like many a departed conviction it has left a monument of
custom to keep its memory green. The practice of forming a line and
shaking the President's hand had no other origin, and when that great
dignitary bestows his healing salutation on
strangely visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The Devil's Dictionary |
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 Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: As to the voluptuaries, I can assure them that the playwright,
whether he be myself or another, will always disappoint them.
The drama can do little to delight the senses: all the apparent
instances to the contrary are instances of the personal
fascination of the performers. The drama of pure feeling is no
longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been conquered by
the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem
cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is
dry, tedious, and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner's Tristan,
even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often
is in Germany. Indeed, it needed no Wagner to convince the
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