| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: This was said with softness and humility.
Uncertain--as his gravity often left her--precisely what he meant
by what he said, Molly proceeded with EMMA, slackly at first, but
soon with the enthusiasm that Miss Austen invariably gave her.
She held the volume and read away at it, commenting briefly, and
then, finishing a chapter of the sprightly classic, found her
pupil slumbering peacefully. There was no uncertainty about that.
"You couldn't be doing a healthier thing for him, deary," said
Mrs. Taylor. "If it gets to make him wakeful, try something
harder." This was the lady's scarcely sympathetic view.
But it turned out to be not obscurity in which Miss Austen
The Virginian |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: when the works of sculptors in general were produced, was at a loss and
went to sleep and had nothing to say?
ION: No indeed; no more than the other.
SOCRATES: And if I am not mistaken, you never met with any one among
flute-players or harp-players or singers to the harp or rhapsodes who was
able to discourse of Olympus or Thamyras or Orpheus, or Phemius the
rhapsode of Ithaca, but was at a loss when he came to speak of Ion of
Ephesus, and had no notion of his merits or defects?
ION: I cannot deny what you say, Socrates. Nevertheless I am conscious in
my own self, and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak
better and have more to say about Homer than any other man. But I do not
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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 Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: dejection to bed; but in the passage I encountered Mr. Vereker, who
had been up once more to change, coming out of his room. HE was
humming an air and had on a spotted jacket, and as soon as he saw
me his gaiety gave a start.
"My dear young man," he exclaimed, "I'm so glad to lay hands on
you! I'm afraid I most unwittingly wounded you by those words of
mine at dinner to Miss Poyle. I learned but half an hour ago from
Lady Jane that you're the author of the little notice in THE
MIDDLE."
I protested that no bones were broken; but he moved with me to my
own door, his hand, on my shoulder, kindly feeling for a fracture;
|
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 Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: he stood with the fishermen and harlots by the sea of Galilee,
before His Father and their Father, despised and rejected of
men, without a place to lay His head, wounded for their
iniquities, bruised for their transgressions, would not that
hungry mill-boy at least, in the back seat, have "known the
man"? That Jesus did not stand there.
Wolfe rose at last, and turned from the church down the street.
He looked up; the night had come on foggy, damp; the golden
mists had vanished, and the sky lay dull and ash-colored. He
wandered again aimlessly down the street, idly wondering what
had become of the cloud-sea of crimson and scarlet. The trial-
Life in the Iron-Mills |
