| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: I HAVE come the selfsame path
To the selfsame door,
Years have left the roses there
Burning as before.
While I watch them in the wind
Quick the hot tears start--
Strange so frail a flame outlasts
Fire in the heart.
A PRAYER
UNTIL I lose my soul and lie
Blind to the beauty of the earth,
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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 New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: two or three times a week--but she did not do it with any great
skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting
covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment. The
Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was
crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with
the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the
veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal dread of "blacks"
by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were
rarely open.
She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
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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 Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: considerable time after, came Lord Lowborough in his barouche. Is
he one of the profligate friends, I wonder? I should think not;
for no one could call him a jolly companion, I'm sure, - and,
besides, he appears too sober and gentlemanly in his demeanour to
merit such suspicions. He is a tall, thin, gloomy-looking man,
apparently between thirty and forty, and of a somewhat sickly,
careworn aspect.
At last, Mr. Huntingdon's light phaeton came bowling merrily up the
lawn. I had but a transient glimpse of him: for the moment it
stopped, he sprang out over the side on to the portico steps, and
disappeared into the house.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
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 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: appeared afterwards. The circumstances of our living, coming
in late, and having such and such business to do as required
that nobody should be trusted with the coming into our lodgings,
were such as made it impossible to me to refuse lying with him,
unless I would have owned my sex; and as it was, I effectually
concealed myself. But his ill, and my good fortune, soon put
an end to this life, which I must own I was sick of too, on
several other accounts. We had made several prizes in this
new way of business, but the last would be extraordinary.
There was a shop in a certain street which had a warehouse
behind it that looked into another street, the house making the
Moll Flanders |
