| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: There were thwarted clerks and fiddlers in the Valley of the Shadow,
The commemorative wreckage of what others did not know.
And there were daughters older than the mothers who had borne them,
Being older in their wisdom, which is older than the earth;
And they were going forward only farther into darkness,
Unrelieved as were the blasting obligations of their birth;
And among them, giving always what was not for their possession,
There were maidens, very quiet, with no quiet in their eyes:
There were daughters of the silence in the Valley of the Shadow,
Each an isolated item in the family sacrifice.
There were creepers among catacombs where dull regrets were torches,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs: could scarce attend to aught else for the lure of the wondrous
puzzle which their purpose presented to him.
Among the other books were a primer, some child's readers,
numerous picture books, and a great dictionary. All of
these he examined, but the pictures caught his fancy most,
though the strange little bugs which covered the pages where
there were no pictures excited his wonder and deepest thought.
Squatting upon his haunches on the table top in the cabin
his father had built--his smooth, brown, naked little body
bent over the book which rested in his strong slender hands, and
his great shock of long, black hair falling about his well-
Tarzan of the Apes |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: his boyish escapades, and so he had formed a habit of looking and
judging everything as it affected his own pleasure; he took it as a
matter of course when good souls saved him from the consequences of
his follies, a piece of mistaken kindness which could only lead to his
ruin. Victurnien's early training, noble and pious though it was, had
isolated him too much. He was out of the current of the life of the
time, for the life of a provincial town is certainly not in the main
current of the age; Victurnien's true destiny lifted him above it. He
had learned to think of an action, not as it affected others, nor
relatively, but absolutely from his own point of view. Like despots,
he made the law to suit the circumstance, a system which works in the
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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 Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: station, I caught glimpses of her snowy planking, as she
rolled on the uneven deep, and saw the sun glitter on the
brass of her deck furniture. There, then, was my ship of
refuge; and of all my difficulties only one remained: to get
on board of her.
Half an hour later, I issued at last out of the woods on the
margin of a cove, into whose jaws the tossing and blue
billows entered, and along whose shores they broke with a
surprising loudness. A wooded promontory hid the yacht; and
I had walked some distance round the beach, in what appeared
to be a virgin solitude, when my eye fell on a boat, drawn
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