| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott: their flower-books all that Fairy hands had written there. Some
studied how to watch the tender buds, when to spread them to the
sunlight, and when to shelter them from rain; how to guard the
ripening seeds, and when to lay them in the warm earth or send them
on the summer wind to far off hills and valleys, where other Fairy
hands would tend and cherish them, till a sisterhood of happy flowers
sprang up to beautify and gladden the lonely spot where they had
fallen. Others learned to heal the wounded insects, whose frail limbs
a breeze could shatter, and who, were it not for Fairy hands, would
die ere half their happy summer life had gone. Some learned how by
pleasant dreams to cheer and comfort mortal hearts, by whispered words
Flower Fables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Treasure Island |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: It was nursie who made it, and nursie alone!
The stone, with the white and the yellow and grey,
We discovered I cannot tell HOW far away;
And I carried it back although weary and cold,
For though father denies it, I'm sure it is gold.
But of all my treasures the last is the king,
For there's very few children possess such a thing;
And that is a chisel, both handle and blade,
Which a man who was really a carpenter made.
VI
Block City
A Child's Garden of Verses |
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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and
restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea
and a fitful and unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass,
of the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece. Her
interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. "I
shouldn't care if you did!" he laughed, however; "and it's only a
figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel. NOT to have followed
my perverse young course - and almost in the teeth of my father's
curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, 'over there,' from
that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to
have liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with
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