| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Adventure by Jack London: that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the
mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was
not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of
a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the moment she knew
a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right in his
judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her
little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings of
the sea were of far more vital interest to her than men, and the
next moment she was staring through the warm tropic darkness at the
loom of the sails and the steady green of the moving sidelight, and
listening eagerly to the click of the sweeps in the rowlocks. In
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: but the person who dropped it might come back to look for it. I had
no such need of money, nor was the sum so big that I had any
inclination to meddle with it, or to get the money at the hazard it
might be attended with; so I seemed to go away, when the man who
had opened the door said he would take it up, but so that if the right
owner came for it he should be sure to have it. So he went in and
fetched a pail of water and set it down hard by the purse, then went
again and fetch some gunpowder, and cast a good deal of powder
upon the purse, and then made a train from that which he had thrown
loose upon the purse. The train reached about two yards. After this
he goes in a third time and fetches out a pair of tongs red hot, and
A Journal of the Plague Year |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: the centre, giving it the appearance of a tiny compound flower,
daisy or groundsel; in the other they are crossed with waving
grooves, giving the whole a peculiar fretted look, even more
beautiful than that of the former species. They are Tubulipora
patina and Tubulipora hispida; - and stay - break off that tiny
rough red wart, and look at its cells also under the magnifier: it
is Cellepora pumicosa; and now, with the Madrepore, you hold in
your hand the principal, at least the commonest, British types of
those famed coral insects, which in the tropics are the architects
of continents, and the conquerors of the ocean surge. All the
world, since the publication of Darwin's delightful "Voyage of the
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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 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: the holy whiteness of the clergyman's good fame, had she visited
him in his own study, where many a penitent, ere now, had
confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by
the scarlet letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or
undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly
that her conscious heart imparted suspicion where none could have
been felt, and partly that both the minister and she would need
the whole wide world to breathe in, while they talked together --
for all these reasons Hester never thought of meeting him in any
narrower privacy than beneath the open sky.
The Scarlet Letter |
