| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our
daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger
and death. But did he see like that?
THE STAR
It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement
was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the
motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets
that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had
already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity
in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to
interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were
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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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth
century were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had
taught her the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge,
but they would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery
thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty.
The one hour or the two hours weekly passed very pleasantly,
partly owing to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window
looked upon the back of a shop, where figures appeared against
the red windows in winter, partly to the accidents that are bound
to happen when more than two people are in the same room together.
But there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately.
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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 Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: namesake, had paid penances of early rising and two hours of
scales before breakfast, working with stiffened fingers in her
cold little room where there was no room for a stove, and sitting
on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once pink
butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee,
rolls, and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett
at the piano in the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater
and fingerless gloves and holding a hot-water bottle on her
knees. Three rooms beyond, down the stone hall, the Big Soprano,
doing Madama Butterfly in bad German, helped to make an
encircling wall of sound in the center of which one might
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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 Aesop's Fables by Aesop: said the little Mouse.
Little friends may prove great friends.
The Swallow and the Other Birds
It happened that a Countryman was sowing some hemp seeds in a
field where a Swallow and some other birds were hopping about
picking up their food. "Beware of that man," quoth the Swallow.
"Why, what is he doing?" said the others. "That is hemp seed he
is sowing; be careful to pick up every one of the seeds, or else
you will repent it." The birds paid no heed to the Swallow's
words, and by and by the hemp grew up and was made into cord, and
of the cords nets were made, and many a bird that had despised the
Aesop's Fables |
