| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: exercise moral influence over their fellow-citizens, as champions
in the battle against dirt and drunkenness, disease and death.
There may be those who would answer--or rather, there would
certainly have been those who would have so answered thirty years
ago, before the so-called materialism of advanced science had
taught us some practical wisdom about education, and reminded
people that they have bodies as well as minds and souls--"You say,
we are likely to grow weaklier, unhealthier. And if it were so,
what matter? Mind makes the man, not body. We do not want our
children to be stupid giants and bravos; but clever, able, highly
educated, however weakly Providence or the laws of nature may have
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pericles by William Shakespeare: Should therein make me vile, the common body,
By you relieved, would force me to my duty:
But if to that my nature need a spur,
The gods revenge it upon me and mine,
To the end of generation!
PERICLES.
I believe you;
Your honour and your goodness teach me to 't,
Without your vows. Till she be married, madam,
By bright Diana, whom we honour, all
Unscissar'd shall this hair of mine remain,
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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 Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: an object she waited for and watched, the same as she had come to love the
dreaming, murmuring melody of the waterfall. She lingered there. What had
the sights and sounds and smells of this wild canyon come to mean to her?
She could not say. But they had changed immeasurably.
Her soft slippers made no sound on the porch, and as she turned the corner
of the house, where shadows hovered thick, she heard Lee Stanton's voice:
"But, Flo, you loved me before Kilbourne came."
The content, the pathos, of his voice chained Carley to the spot. Some
situations, like fate, were beyond resisting.
"Shore I did," replied Flo, dreamily. This was the voice of a girl who was
being confronted by happy and sad thoughts on her birthday.
The Call of the Canyon |
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 Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: journey which two beings undertake through the fair domains of love,
this moment is like a waste land to be traversed, a land without a
tree, alternatively damp and warm, full of scorching sand, traversed
by marshes, which leads to smiling groves clad with roses, where Love
and his retinue of pleasures disport themselves on carpets of soft
verdure. Often the witty man finds himself afflicted with a foolish
laugh which is his only answer to everything; his wit is, as it were,
suffocated beneath the icy pressure of his desires. It would not be
impossible for two beings of equal beauty, intelligence, and passion
to utter at first nothing but the most silly commonplaces, until
chance, a word, the tremor of a certain glance, the communication of a
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
