| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up
my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful
as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics.
Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had
borne when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby.
He said--
'That's the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes
didn't change every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use.
Take this place where we are now, for instance.
As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom
right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake: Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
Songs of Innocence and Experience |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: eyes under the hood; but saw instead a slender brown boy, in some
kind of fanciful page's dress, who thrust a folded paper between
his fingers and vanished in the throng. Tony, in a tingle,
glanced surreptitiously at the Count, who appeared absorbed in
his prayers. The crowd, at the ringing of a bell, had in fact
been overswept by a sudden wave of devotion; and Tony seized the
moment to step beneath a lighted shrine with his letter.
"I am in dreadful trouble and implore your help. Polixena"--he
read; but hardly had he seized the sense of the words when a hand
fell on his shoulder, and a stern-looking man in a cocked hat,
and bearing a kind of rod or mace, pronounced a few words in
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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 An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of
purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues -
and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins - one after
the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody
disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to
a man - now they crush him. And yours is a very nasty scandal. You
couldn't survive it. If it were known that as a young man, secretary
to a great and important minister, you sold a Cabinet secret for a
large sum of money, and that that was the origin of your wealth and
career, you would be hounded out of public life, you would disappear
completely. And after all, Sir Robert, why should you sacrifice your
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