| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Emma by Jane Austen: under the most favourable circumstances, to require something
more than human perfection of body and mind to be discharged with
tolerable comfort.
With regard to her not accompanying them to Ireland, her account
to her aunt contained nothing but truth, though there might be some
truths not told. It was her own choice to give the time of their
absence to Highbury; to spend, perhaps, her last months of perfect
liberty with those kind relations to whom she was so very dear:
and the Campbells, whatever might be their motive or motives,
whether single, or double, or treble, gave the arrangement
their ready sanction, and said, that they depended more on a few
Emma |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: sold for food at a year old, in the manner I prescribe, and
thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as
they have since gone through, by the oppression of landlords, the
impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of
common sustenance, with neither house nor cloaths to cover them
from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable
prospect of intailing the like, or greater miseries, upon their
breed for ever.
I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the
least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary
work, having no other motive than the publick good of my country,
A Modest Proposal |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: thither. One had listened to a traveller's tale of this
marvellous stone in his own distant country, and had immediately
been seized with such a thirst for beholding it as could only be
quenched in its intensest lustre. Another, so long ago as when
the famous Captain Smith visited these coasts, had seen it
blazing far at sea, and had felt no rest in all the intervening
years till now that he took up the search. A third, being
encamped on a hunting expedition full forty miles south of the
White Mountains, awoke at midnight, and beheld the Great
Carbuncle gleaming like a meteor, so that the shadows of the
trees fell backward from it. They spoke of the innumerable
Twice Told Tales |
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 Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the
one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the
public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but
hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts
enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the
modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in
mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen
these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a
pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of
just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary
architect is condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor
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