| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey: notes of a catbird to tell him that near at hand, somewhere, was human life.
Once more Wetzel became a tiger. The hot blood leaped from his heart, firing
all his veins and nerves. But calmly noiseless, certain, cold, deadly as a
snake he began the familiar crawling method of stalking his game.
On, on under the briars and thickets, across the hollows full of yellow
leaves, up over stony patches of ground to the fern-covered cliff overhanging
the glade he glided--lithe, sinuous, a tiger in movement and in heart.
He parted the long, graceful ferns and gazed with glittering eyes down into
the beautiful glade.
He saw not the shining spring nor the purple moss, nor the ghastly white
bones--all that the buzzards had left of the dead--nor anything, save a
The Spirit of the Border |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: nothing even for himself, he were just everything here, and if not
for a crowd of witnesses or indeed for any witness but John
Marcher, then by clear right of the register that he could scan
like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his friend, and
there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his life,
there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself. He did
this from time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander
through the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who
was, in the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self;
and to wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a
third presence--not wandering she, but stationary, still, whose
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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 Touchstone by Edith Wharton: do with his reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body;
but that merely lowered anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust
he felt--almost a physical nausea. The poisonous fumes of life
were in his lungs. He was sick, unutterably sick. . . .
He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little
dinner that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving.
He looked at his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed
to him the beauty of a smooth sea along an unlit coast. She
frightened him.
He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid
lock the front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights
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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 Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: account me a cipher," said the old admiral suddenly. "Don't you know
that if he is a gentleman, I have more than one bag in my hold that
will stop any leak in his fortune?"
"As to that, if he is a son of Longueville's, he will want nothing;
but," said Monsieur de Fontaine, shaking his head from side to side,
"his father has not even washed off the stains of his origin. Before
the Revolution he was an attorney, and the DE he has since assumed no
more belongs to him than half of his fortune."
"Pooh! pooh! happy those whose fathers were hanged!" cried the admiral
gaily.
Three or four days after this memorable day, on one of those fine
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