| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: Touchett retorted.
"Then, obviously, she needn't have written them; whereas the man,
poor devil, could hardly help receiving them."
"Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of
reading them," said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. "From
the way you defend him, I believe you know who he is."
Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior
air of the woman who is in her husband's professional secrets.
Dresham shrugged his shoulders.
"What have I said to defend him?"
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Macbeth by William Shakespeare: the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore
much Drinke may be said to be an Equiuocator with Lecherie:
it makes him, and it marres him; it sets him on,
and it takes him off; it perswades him, and dis-heartens
him; makes him stand too, and not stand too: in conclusion,
equiuocates him in a sleepe, and giuing him the Lye,
leaues him
Macd. I beleeue, Drinke gaue thee the Lye last Night
Port. That it did, Sir, i'the very Throat on me: but I
requited him for his Lye, and (I thinke) being too strong
for him, though he tooke vp my Legges sometime, yet I
Macbeth |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its
hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.
Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always
be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray.
Don't frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius--
is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.
It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,
or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver
shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine
right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile.
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
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 Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: at the window pane, to the beautiful Lady Stutfield, who was always
obliged to wear a black velvet band round her throat to hide the
mark of five fingers burnt upon her white skin, and who drowned
herself at last in the carp-pond at the end of the King's Walk.
With the enthusiastic egotism of the true artist he went over his
most celebrated performances, and smiled bitterly to himself as he
recalled to mind his last appearance as 'Red Ruben, or the
Strangled Babe,' his DEBUT as 'Gaunt Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of
Bexley Moor,' and the FURORE he had excited one lovely June evening
by merely playing ninepins with his own bones upon the lawn-tennis
ground. And after all this, some wretched modern Americans were to
|
