| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: At any rate, this whole fiendish transaction was soon
hushed up. There was very little said about it at all,
and nothing done. It was a common saying, even
among little white boys, that it was worth a half-
cent to kill a "nigger," and a half-cent to bury one.
CHAPTER V
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: as the comfort slid past my feet I sat up and screamed at the top
of my voice.
Of course, people came running in all sorts of things. I was
still sitting up, declaring I had seen a ghost and that the house
was haunted. Dallas was struggling for the second armhole of his
dressing gown and Bella had already turned on the lights. They
said I had had a nightmare, and not to sleep on my back, and
perhaps I was taking grippe.
And just then we heard Jimmy run down the stairs, and fall over
something, almost breaking his wrist. It was the eiderdown
comfort, half-way up the studio staircase!
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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 Manon Lescaut by Abbe Prevost: pleasure have momentarily drawn you aside. What detriment to the
sacred cause of virtue! Your flight from Amiens gave me such
intense sorrow, that I have not since known a moment's happiness.
You may judge of this by the steps it induced me to take.' He
then told me how, after discovering that I had deceived him, and
gone off with my mistress, he procured horses for the purpose of
pursuing me, but having the start of him by four or five hours,
he found it impossible to overtake me; that he arrived, however,
at St. Denis half an hour after I had left it; that, being very
sure that I must have stopped in Paris, he spent six weeks there
in a fruitless endeavour to discover me--visiting every place
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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 Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: weight, or as if a spell had been dissolved. I know not in what
words I answered; but, standing before her on the cliffs, I poured
out the whole ardour of my love, telling her that I lived upon the
thought of her, slept only to dream of her loveliness, and would
gladly forswear my country, my language, and my friends, to live
for ever by her side. And then, strongly commanding myself, I
changed the note; I reassured, I comforted her; I told her I had
divined in her a pious and heroic spirit, with which I was worthy
to sympathise, and which I longed to share and lighten. 'Nature,'
I told her, 'was the voice of God, which men disobey at peril; and
if we were thus humbly drawn together, ay, even as by a miracle of
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