| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: without an object to fix upon over immeasureable plains, and lakes
that seemed replenished by the ocean, whilst eternal forests of
small clustering trees, obstructed the circulation of air, and
embarrassed the path, without gratifying the eye of taste. No
cottage smiling in the waste, no travellers hailed us, to give life
to silent nature; or, if perchance we saw the print of a footstep
in our path, it was a dreadful warning to turn aside; and the head
ached as if assailed by the scalping knife. The Indians who hovered
on the skirts of the European settlements had only learned of their
neighbours to plunder, and they stole their guns from them to
do it with more safety.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: away he murmured coldly: 'God guard you, Senora!' Senora! What
sternness! We were off a little way already when his heart
softened and he shouted after me in a terrible voice: 'The road to
Heaven is repentance!' And then, after a silence, again the great
shout 'Repentance!' thundered after me. Was that sternness or
simplicity, I wonder? Or a mere unmeaning superstition, a
mechanical thing? If there lives anybody completely honest in this
world, surely it must be my uncle. And yet - who knows?
"Would you guess what was the next thing I did? Directly I got
over the frontier I wrote from Bayonne asking the old man to send
me out my sister here. I said it was for the service of the King.
The Arrow of Gold |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: so terribly shaken itself, and he perforce had to forget his wife
and his child and all the friends and possessions he had left up
there, and start life over again in the lower world. He started it
again but ill, blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment in
the mines; but the story he told begot a legend that lingers along
the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.
He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness,
into which he had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a
vast bale of gear, when he was a child. The valley, he said, had
in it all that the heart of man could desire--sweet water, pasture,
an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub
|
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 Danny's Own Story by Don Marquis: perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing
about farming. He'd sell fifteen or twenty acres,
every now and then, and they'd be high times till
he'd spent it up, and mebby Elmira would get
some new clothes.
But when I was found on the door step, the land
was all gone, and Hank was practising reg'lar,
when not busy cussing out the fellers that had bought
the land. Fur some smart fellers had come along,
and bought up all that swamp land and dreened
it, and now it was worth seventy or eighty dollars
|
