| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: more real to me. I can bring it back into memory so that I see it
again--I could draw it or paint it. And after all--"
He stopped--but I said nothing.
"The face of a dream--the face of a dream. She was beautiful.
Not that beauty which is terrible, cold, and worshipful, like the
beauty of a saint; nor that beauty that stirs fierce passions; but
a sort of radiation, sweet lips that softened into smiles, and
grave gray eyes. And she moved gracefully, she seemed to have part
with all pleasant and gracious things--"
He stopped, and his face was downcast and hidden. Then he
looked up at me and went on, making no further attempt to disguise
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: scenery, the weather, the geological formation of the country, its
vegetation, and the living habits of its denizens. A sportsman,
out in all weathers, and often dependent for success on his
knowledge of "what the sky is going to do," has opportunities for
becoming a meteorologist which no one beside but a sailor
possesses; and one has often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or
huntsman, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious and
seemingly capricious phenomena of "scent," might perhaps throw
light on a hundred dark passages of hygrometry. The fisherman,
too, - what an inexhaustible treasury of wonder lies at his feet,
in the subaqueous world of the commonest mountain burn! All the
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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 Paz by Honore de Balzac: become the superior."
"Oh, Paz is truly my superior," said Adam, naively; "I have no
advantage over him except mere luck."
His wife kissed him for the generosity of those words.
"The extreme care with which he hides the grandeur of his feelings is
one form of his superiority," continued the count. "I said to him
once: 'You are a sly one; you have in your heart a vast domain within
which you live and think.' He has a right to the title of count; but
in Paris he won't be called anything but captain."
"The fact is that the Florentine of the middle-ages has reappeared in
our century," said the countess. "Dante and Michael Angelo are in
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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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: do not interest me. My children are all growing up and at school. I have
servants enough to attend to my house. When he comes home in the evening,
if I try to amuse him by telling him of the things I have been doing during
the day, of the bazaars I am working for, the shopping I have done, the
visits I have paid, he is bored. He is anxious to get away to his study,
his books, and his men friends, and I am left utterly alone. If it were
not for the society of women and other men with whom I have more in common,
I could not bear my life. When we first met as boy and girl, and fell in
love, we danced and rode together and seemed to have everything in common;
now we have nothing. I respect him and I believe he respects me, but that
is all!" It is, perhaps, only in close confidences between man and man and
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