| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: counterfeit if I seem to hint that there was in his nature any
ounce of calculation. He took whatever came, but he never plotted
for it, and no man who was so much of an absorbent can ever have
been so little of a parasite. He had a system of the universe, but
he had no system of sponging--that was quite hand-to-mouth. He had
fine gross easy senses, but it was not his good-natured appetite
that wrought confusion. If he had loved us for our dinners we
could have paid with our dinners, and it would have been a great
economy of finer matter. I make free in these connexions with the
plural possessive because if I was never able to do what the
Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger houses and simpler
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: was a wild rose-hush, covered, in this month of June, with its
delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance
and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the
condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that
the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in
history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old
wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks
that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is far
authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of
The Scarlet Letter |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: fascinating and lengthy dives into the interior valleys in the
hearts of Napa and Lake Counties, travelled the coast for hundreds
of miles on end, and are now in Eureka, on Humboldt Bay, which was
discovered by accident by the gold-seekers, who were trying to
find their way to and from the Trinity diggings. Even here, the
white man's history preceded them, for dim tradition says that the
Russians once anchored here and hunted sea-otter before the first
Yankee trader rounded the Horn, or the first Rocky Mountain
trapper thirsted across the "Great American Desert" and trickled
down the snowy Sierras to the sun-kissed land. No; we are not
resting our horses here on Humboldt Bay. We are writing this
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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 Mansion by Henry van Dyke: his lips were curled. "Principle!" he said. "You mean
principal--and
interest too. Well, sir, you know best whether that is religion
or not.
But if it is, count me out, please. Tom saved me from going to
the devil,
six years ago; and I'll be damned if I don't help him to the best
of
my ability now."
John Weightman looked at his son steadily. "Harold," he said at
last,
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