| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: know, regard those airy perches on the top of the coach as the
best seats; and for the first few miles I discovered abundance of
excellent reasons for justifying the opinion of our neighbors. A
young fellow, apparently in somewhat better circumstances, who
came to take the seat beside me from preference, listened to my
reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness of
age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh
air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach
was lumbering along,--these things, together with an
indescribable magnetic something, drew us before long into one of
those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: the fulness of that perfect knowledge of God which God had Himself
given to him.
And one evening he passed out of the eleventh city, which was a
city of Armenia, and his disciples and a great crowd of people
followed after him; and he went up on to a mountain and sat down on
a rock that was on the mountain, and his disciples stood round him,
and the multitude knelt in the valley.
And he bowed his head on his hands and wept, and said to his Soul,
'Why is it that I am full of sorrow and fear, and that each of my
disciples is an enemy that walks in the noonday?' And his Soul
answered him and said, 'God filled thee with the perfect knowledge
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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 Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: withstand the lure of battle.
Leaping over the ship's side to the ground, he joined
the last of his bowmen as they raced off over the dead
sea-bottom in pursuit of the fleeing green horde.
Beyond a low promontory of what once had been an
island the green men were disappearing toward the west.
Close upon their heels raced the fleet bowmen of a bygone day,
and forging steadily ahead among them Carthoris and Thuvia
could see the mighty figure of Kar Komak, brandishing aloft
the Torquasian short-sword with which he was armed, as he
urged his creatures after the retreating enemy.
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
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 Middlemarch by George Eliot: to be written in an unknown character. There are answers which,
in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room,
and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice
is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than
in philosophy.
Dorothea left Ladislaw's two letters unread on her husband's
writing-table and went to her own place, the scorn and indignation
within her rejecting the reading of these letters, just as we
hurl away any trash towards which we seem to have been suspected
of mean cupidity. She did not in the least divine the subtle
sources of her husband's bad temper about these letters:
Middlemarch |
