| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: was of interest about himself and I had nothing
to relate. I looked out of the window. Here
and there, behind the trees, I caught glimpses of
a number of poor, low houses straggling along
the bank of the Terek, which flowed seaward in
an ever-widening stream; farther off rose the
dark-blue, jagged wall of the mountains, behind
which Mount Kazbek gazed forth in his high-
priest's hat of white. I took a mental farewell
of them; I felt sorry to leave them. . .
Thus we sat for a considerable time. The sun
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: every beam quivered in its mortices at the passing of the lightest
vehicle. This venerable structure was crowned by a triangular roof of
which no example will, ere long, be seen in Paris. This covering,
warped by the extremes of the Paris climate, projected three feet over
the roadway, as much to protect the threshold from the rainfall as to
shelter the wall of a loft and its sill-less dormer-window. This upper
story was built of planks, overlapping each other like slates, in
order, no doubt, not to overweight the frail house.
One rainy morning in the month of March, a young man, carefully
wrapped in his cloak, stood under the awning of a shop opposite this
old house, which he was studying with the enthusiasm of an antiquary.
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open;
then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it
uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into
Brydon's throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn't utter; for
the bared identity was too hideous as HIS, and his glare was the
passion of his protest. The face, THAT face, Spencer Brydon's? -
he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and
denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was
unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility! -
He had been "sold," he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this:
the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a
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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 Enemies of Books by William Blades: which dates from Eve, is a common motive in the stories
of our oldest literature and Folk-lore. What made Fatima
so anxious to know the contents of the room forbidden her
by Bluebeard? It was positively nothing to her, and its
contents caused not the slightest annoyance to anybody.
That story has a bad moral, and it would, in many ways, have been
more satisfactory had the heroine been left to take her place in
the blood-stained chamber, side by side with her peccant predecessors.
Why need the women-folk (God forgive me!) bother themselves about
the inside of a man's library, and whether it wants dusting or not?
My boys' playroom, in which is a carpenter's bench, a lathe,
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