| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: small silent laugh before she mounted them nimbly, and she peered over the
high bunk at the astonished Fenella.
"You didn't think your grandma could do that, did you?" said she. And as
she sank back Fenella heard her light laugh again.
The hard square of brown soap would not lather, and the water in the bottle
was like a kind of blue jelly. How hard it was, too, to turn down those
stiff sheets; you simply had to tear your way in. If everything had been
different, Fenella might have got the giggles...At last she was inside, and
while she lay there panting, there sounded from above a long, soft
whispering, as though some one was gently, gently rustling among tissue
paper to find something. It was grandma saying her prayers...
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: Rastignac's elegant cabriolet enter the court-yard while he was paying
his cab at the gate, Nathan's vanity was stung; he resolved to have a
cabriolet himself, and its accompanying tiger, too. The carriage of
the countess was in the court-yard, and the sight of it swelled
Raoul's heart with joy. Marie was advancing under the pressure of her
desires with the regularity of the hands of a clock obeying the
mainspring. He found her sitting at the corner of the fireplace in the
little salon. Instead of looking at Nathan when he was announced, she
looked at his reflection in a mirror.
"Monsieur le ministre," said Madame d'Espard, addressing Nathan, and
presenting him to de Marsay by a glance, "was maintaining, when you
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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 Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: handsome being and handsome doing.'
'Poor Miss Handsome-does cuts but a sorry figure beside Miss
Handsome-is in every man's eyes, your own not excepted, Mr.
Knight, though it pleases you to throw off so,' said Elfride
saucily. And lowering her voice: 'You ought not to have taken so
much trouble to save me from falling over the cliff, for you don't
think mine a life worth much trouble evidently.'
'Perhaps you think mine was not worth yours.'
'It was worth anybody's!'
Her hand was plashing in the little waterfall, and her eyes were
bent the same way.
A Pair of Blue Eyes |
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 Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: These ancient seafarers had houses and lands not outwardly
different from other Dunnet Landing dwellings, and two of them were
fathers of families, but their true dwelling places were the sea,
and the stony beach that edged its familiar shore, and the fish-
houses, where much salt brine from the mackerel kits had soaked the
very timbers into a state of brown permanence and petrifaction. It
had also affected the old fishermen's hard complexions, until one
fancied that when Death claimed them it could only be with the aid,
not of any slender modern dart, but the good serviceable harpoon of
a seventeenth century woodcut.
Elijah Tilley was such an evasive, discouraged-looking person,
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