| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: theorist.'
'Shall we test it?' he asked. 'The doctor is close by. If there
is not an open wound on your shoulder, I am wrong. If there is - '
He waved his hand. 'But I advise you to think twice. There is a
deuce of a nasty drawback to the experiment - that what might have
remained private between us two becomes public property.'
'Oh, well!' said I, with a laugh, 'anything rather than a doctor!
I cannot bear the breed.'
His last words had a good deal relieved me, but I was still far
from comfortable.
Major Chevenix smoked awhile, looking now at his cigar ash, now at
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare: Exit all but Wall.
Thes. I wonder if the Lion be to speake
Deme. No wonder, my Lord: one Lion may, when
many Asses doe.
Exit Lyon, Thisbie, and Mooneshine.
Wall. In this same Interlude, it doth befall,
That I, one Snowt (by name) present a wall:
And such a wall, as I would haue you thinke,
That had in it a crannied hole or chinke:
Through which the Louers, Piramus and Thisbie
Did whisper often, very secretly.
A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: Every one elaborately ignored my absence from dinner. The Dallas
Browns, Max and Lollie were at bridge; Jim was alone in the den,
walking the floor and biting at an unlighted cigar; Betty had
returned to Aunt Selina and was hysterical, they said, and
Flannigan was in deep dejection because I had missed my dinner.
"Betty is making no end of a row," Max said, looking up from his
game, "because the old lady upstairs insists on chloroform
liniment. Betty says the smell makes her ill."
"And she can inhale Russian cigarettes," Anne said enviously,
"and gasolene fumes, without turning a hair. I call a revoke,
Dal; you trumped spades on the second round."
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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 Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: through nature at large, inhaling the sweet gale natural to the
clime; while the reveries of a feverish imagination continually
sport themselves in gardens full of aromatic shrubs, which cloy
while they delight, and weaken the sense of pleasure they gratify.
The heaven of fancy, below or beyond the stars, in this life, or
in those ever-smiling regions surrounded by the unmarked ocean of
futurity, have an insipid uniformity which palls. Poets have
imagined scenes of bliss; but, sencing out sorrow, all the extatic
emotions of the Soul, and even its grandeur, seem to be equally
excluded. We dose over the unruffled lake, and long to scale the
rocks which fence the happy valley of contentment, though serpents
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