| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil: Twice doth the tree yield service of her fruit.
But ravening tigers come not nigh, nor breed
Of savage lion, nor aconite betrays
Its hapless gatherers, nor with sweep so vast
Doth the scaled serpent trail his endless coils
Along the ground, or wreathe him into spires.
Mark too her cities, so many and so proud,
Of mighty toil the achievement, town on town
Up rugged precipices heaved and reared,
And rivers undergliding ancient walls.
Or should I celebrate the sea that laves
Georgics |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: from what I recall of my chemistry it is distinctly possible.
Springs have been known to change their character, and the
coincidence--the dog and the water--is certainly startling.
Still, as nobody feels ill--"
But they weren't sure they didn't. The bishop said he felt
perfectly well, but he had a strange inclination to yawn all the
time, and Mrs. Biggs' left arm had gone to sleep. And then, with
the excitement and all, Miss Cobb took a violent pain in the back
of her neck and didn't know whether to cry or to laugh.
Well, I did what I could. The worst of it was, I wasn't sure it
wasn't the water. I thought possibly Mr. Pierce had made a
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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 Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: valiantly at Lansdowne over Bath. But, like most other things
which owed their existence to the Stuarts, it rose only to fall
again. An old man who had seen, as a boy, the foundation of the
new house laid, lived to see it pulled down again, and the very
bricks and timber sold upon the spot; and since then the stables
have become a farm-house, the tennis-court a sheep-cote, the great
quadrangle a rick-yard; and civilization, spreading wave on wave so
fast elsewhere, has surged back from that lonely corner of the
land--let us hope, only for a while.
But I am not writing of that great new Stow House, of the past
glories whereof quaint pictures still hang in the neighboring
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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 The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: 1904. VILLA QUARTO, FLORENCE, JANUARY.
Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me,
but it goes very well, and is going to save time and "language"--
the kind of language that soothes vexation.
I have dictated to a typewriter before--but not autobiography.
Between that experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap--
more than thirty years! It is sort of lifetime. In that wide interval
much has happened--to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us.
At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity.
The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the
other way about: the person who DOESN'T own one is a curiosity.
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