| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: verandahs were half full of branches torn from the forest.
There was a last very wild squall about six; the rain, like a
thick white smoke, flying past the house in volleys, and as
swift, it seemed, as rifle balls; all with a strange,
strident hiss, such as I have only heard before at sea, and,
indeed, thought to be a marine phenomenon. Since then the
wind has been falling with a few squalls, mostly rain. But
our road is impassable for horses; we hear a schooner has
been wrecked and some native houses blown down in Apia, where
Belle is still and must remain a prisoner. Lucky I returned
while I could! But the great good is this; much bread-fruit
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: question, 'Into how little space a human soul can be crushed?' I have seen
some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble,
and found room to move there--wide room. A woman who has been for many
years in one of those places carries the mark of the beast on her till she
dies, though she may expand a little afterward, when she breathes in the
free world."
"Were you miserable?" he asked, looking at her with quick anxiety.
"I?--no. I am never miserable and never happy. I wish I were. But I
should have run away from the place on the fourth day, and hired myself to
the first Boer-woman whose farm I came to, to make fire under her soap-pot,
if I had to live as the rest of the drove did. Can you form an idea,
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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 Lemorne Versus Huell by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard: He took the fan from me.
"Speak of yourself," he said.
"Speak you."
"I am what I seem, a man within your sphere. By all the accidents
of position and circumstance suited to it. Have you not learned
it?"
"I am not what I seem. I never wore so splendid a dress as this
till tonight, and shall not again."
He gave the fan such a twirl that its slender sticks snapped, and
it dropped like the broken wing of a bird.
"Mr. Uxbridge, that fan belongs to Mrs. Bliss."
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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 Silas Marner by George Eliot: was undoubtedly for Eppie's welfare; and he felt himself called
upon, for her sake, to assert his authority.
"I should have thought, Marner," he said, severely--"I should
have thought your affection for Eppie would make you rejoice in what
was for her good, even if it did call upon you to give up something.
You ought to remember your own life's uncertain, and she's at an age
now when her lot may soon be fixed in a way very different from what
it would be in her father's home: she may marry some low
working-man, and then, whatever I might do for her, I couldn't make
her well-off. You're putting yourself in the way of her welfare;
and though I'm sorry to hurt you after what you've done, and what
Silas Marner |
