| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: their age, and their long service still more conspicuous. An
indescribable odor pervaded the room, a mingled smell of the
exhalations from the lumber room, and the vapors of the dining-
room, with those from the stairs, though the window was partly
open. The air from the street fluttered the dusty curtains, which
were carefully drawn so as to hide the window bay, where former
tenants had testified to their presence by various ornamental
additions--a sort of domestic fresco.
Adelaide hastened to open the door of the inner room, where she
announced the painter with evident pleasure. Hippolyte, who, of
yore, had seen the same signs of poverty in his mother's home,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: `You could never pin that, Mr. Ordinsky. You've kept it
folded too long, and the goods is all gone along the crease.
Take it off. I can put a new piece of lining-silk in there
for you in ten minutes.' She disappeared into her work-room
with the vest, leaving me to confront the Pole, who stood
against the door like a wooden figure. He folded his arms
and glared at me with his excitable, slanting brown eyes.
His head was the shape of a chocolate drop, and was covered with dry,
straw-coloured hair that fuzzed up about his pointed crown.
He had never done more than mutter at me as I passed him,
and I was surprised when he now addressed me. `Miss Lingard,'
My Antonia |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: his tarry-at-home life to their wandering from city to city. The tone
which he assumes towards them is one of real friendliness, but also of
concealed irony. Towards Anaxagoras, who had disappointed him in his hopes
of learning about mind and nature, he shows a less kindly feeling, which is
also the feeling of Plato in other passages (Laws). But Anaxagoras had
been dead thirty years, and was beyond the reach of persecution.
It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers who
would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more violent
terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference can be drawn
from this circumstance as to the probability of the words attributed to him
having been actually uttered. They express the aspiration of the first
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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 Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived
at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused
our flambeaux rather to glow than flame.
At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another
less spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled
to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of
Paris. Three sides of this interior crypt were still ornamented in
this manner. From the fourth side the bones had been thrown down,
and lay promiscuously upon the earth, forming at one point a mound
of some size. Within the wall thus exposed by the displacing of
the bones, we perceived a still interior recess, in depth
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