| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White: and spread them in a row, and counted them, and put them back in
his pocket, and then all of a sudden snatched out two handfuls
and threw them as far as he could.
"Too heavy," he muttered, but that was all he could bring himself
to throw away.
All that night we wandered high in the air. I guess we tried to
keep a general direction, but I don't know. Anyway, along late,
but before moonrise--she was now on the wane--I came to, and
found myself looking over the edge of a twenty-foot drop. Right
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: best man would survive. It was a great, terrible,
and cruel misfortune."
He had survived! I saw him before me as
though preserved for a witness to the mighty truth
of an unerring and eternal principle. Great beads
of perspiration stood on his forehead. And sud-
denly it struck the table with a heavy blow, as he
fell forward throwing his hands out.
"And this is worse," he cried. "This is a worse
pain! This is more terrible."
He made my heart thump with the profound con-
Falk |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever
enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any
other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but
three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days.
Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for
even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony,
panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's
peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he
had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred
his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus
temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly
Moby Dick |
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 Gorgias by Plato: a private man or not; and I should say, Callicles, that he is most likely
to have been a philosopher who has done his own work, and not troubled
himself with the doings of other men in his lifetime; him Rhadamanthus
sends to the Islands of the Blessed. Aeacus does the same; and they both
have sceptres, and judge; but Minos alone has a golden sceptre and is
seated looking on, as Odysseus in Homer declares that he saw him:
'Holding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead.'
Now I, Callicles, am persuaded of the truth of these things, and I consider
how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the judge in that
day. Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I desire only to know
the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as
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