| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: It was not without deep emotion that I burned the letter of which I
was the bearer. You will perhaps smile at my German imagination, but I
see a drama of sad sublimity in the eternal secrecy which engulfed
those parting words cast between two graves, unknown to all creation,
like the cry uttered in a desert by some lonely traveller whom a lion
seizes."
"And if," I said, interrupting him, "you were brought face to face
with a man now in this room, and were told, 'This is the murderer!'
would not that be another drama? And what would you do?"
Monsieur Hermann looked for his hat and went away.
"You are behaving like a young man, and very heedlessly," said my
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: fierce strength of her nature; it was the best she knew; through
it she came nearest to God. Thinking of the day when she had
given it up, she remembered it with a vague consciousness of
having fought a deadly struggle with her fate, and that she had
been conquered,--never had lived again. Let it be; she could not
bear the struggle again.
She went on dressing herself in a dreary, mechanical way. Once,
a bitter laugh came on her face, as she looked into the glass,
and saw the dead, dull eyes, and the wrinkle on her forehead.
Was that the face to be crowned with delicate caresses and love?
She scorned herself for the moment, grew sick of herself, balked,
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey: nearly eighteen years old a band if Indians--Delawares, I think--crossed the
border on a marauding expedition far into Virginia. They burned the old Wetzel
homestead and murdered the father, mother, two sisters, and a baby brother.
The terrible shock nearly killed Lewis, who for a time was very ill. When he
recovered he went in search of his brothers, Martin and John Wetzel, who were
hunting, and brought them back to their desolated home. Over the ashes of the
home and the graves of the loved ones the brothers swore sleepless and eternal
vengeance. The elder brothers have been devoted all these twenty years and
more to the killing of Indians; but Lewis has been the great foe of the
redman. You have already seen an example of his deeds, and will hear of more.
His name is a household word on the border. Scores of times he has saved,
The Spirit of the Border |
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 Touchstone by Edith Wharton: Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of
new relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her
communications as impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as
though the state, the world, indeed, had taken her off his hands,
assuming the maintenance of a temperament that had long exhausted
his slender store of reciprocity.
In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself
with literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the
extension of her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a
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