| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Light of Western Stars by Zane Grey: procrastinate; but, as it happened, a letter from Alfred made her
departure out of the question for the present. He wrote that his
trip to California had been very profitable, that he had a
proposition for Madeline from a large cattle company, and,
particularly, that he wanted to marry Florence soon after his
arrival home and would bring a minister from Douglas for that
purpose.
Madeline went so far, however, as to promise Helen and her
friends that she would go East soon, at the very latest by
Thanksgiving. With that promise they were reluctantly content to
say good-by to the ranch and to her. At the last moment there
The Light of Western Stars |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: hunt, or whether he was bringing me back my horse, which had run
away because I had again forgotten to throw the reins over his
head and let them trail.
"He'll always stand if yu' do that," the Virginian would say.
"See how my hawss stays right quiet yondeh."
After such admonition he would say no more to me. But this tame
nursery business was assuredly gall to him. For though utterly a
man in countenance and in his self-possession and incapacity to
be put at a loss, he was still boyishly, proud of his wild
calling, and wore his leathers straps and jingled his spurs with
obvious pleasure. His tiger limberness and his beauty were rich
The Virginian |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: As often, on the contrary, as the allied royalists come into conflict
with the Pretender who stands before them--with Bonaparte--, as often as
they believe their parliamentary omnipotence to be endangered by the
Executive, in other words, as often as they must trot out the political
title of their authority, they step up as Republicans, not as
Royalists--and this is done from the Orleanist Thiers, who warns the
National Assembly that the republic divides them least, down to
Legitimist Berryer, who, on December 2, 1851, the scarf of the tricolor
around him, harangues the people assembled before the Mayor's building
of the Tenth Arrondissement, as a tribune in the name of the Republic;
the echo, however, derisively answering back to him: "Henry V.! Henry
|
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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts
for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the
small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the
sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the
second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.
But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see
no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the
time, nor any analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most
likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but
that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
