| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the
train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the
boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls;
but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my
gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable
eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.
But it is not only the person himself who suffers from
his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and
relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a
railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a
man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual
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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 Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: He had no doubt in the matter. He was afraid, terribly afraid, but
glad, glad.
He got out of his bed and stood a moment by the window looking
at the moonshine-flooded garden and trembling at the thing he meant
to do. The air was full of a minute clamor of crickets and
murmurings, of the infinitesimal shouting of little living things.
He went very gently across the creaking boards, for fear that he
might wake the sleeping house, to the big dark clothes-press
wherein his beautiful suit lay folded, and he took it out garment
by garment and softly and very eagerly tore off its tissue-paper
covering and its tacked protections, until there it was, perfect
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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 A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: This fourth clerk, named Frederic Marest, intended to enter the
magistracy, and was now in his third year at the law school. He was a
fine young man of twenty-three, enriched to the amount of some twelve
thousand francs a year by the death of a bachelor uncle, and the son
of Madame Marest, widow of the wealthy wood-merchant. This future
magistrate, actuated by a laudable desire to understand his vocation
in its smallest details, had put himself in Desroches' office for the
purpose of studying legal procedure, and of training himself to take a
place as head-clerk in two years. He hoped to do his "stage" (the
period between the admission as licentiate and the call to the bar) in
Paris, in order to be fully prepared for the functions of a post which
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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 Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: down from it. After passing the barn the road turned to the
wind and they drove into a snow-drift. But ahead of them was a
lane with houses on either side, so evidently the snow had been
blown across the road and they had to drive through the drift.
And so in fact it was. Having driven through the snow they
came out into a street. At the end house of the village some
frozen clothes hanging on a line--shirts, one red and one
white, trousers, leg-bands, and a petticoat--fluttered wildly
in the wind. The white shirt in particular struggled
desperately, waving its sleeves about.
'There now, either a lazy woman or a dead one has not taken her
Master and Man |
