| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: nothing, however, save to tip me a wink that meant "As man to man,
I'm for you." I was too much engrossed either to reprove him or
return the courtesy, but I heard him follow me down the hall to the
small room where we keep outgrown lawbooks, typewriter supplies and,
incidentally, our wraps. I was wondering vaguely if I would ever
hang my hat on its nail again, when the door closed behind me. It
shut firmly, without any particular amount of sound, and I was left
in the dark. I groped my way to it, irritably, to find it locked
on the outside. I shook it frantically, and was rewarded by a
sibilant whisper through the keyhole.
"Keep quiet," Blobs was saying huskily. "You're in deadly peril.
The Man in Lower Ten |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward
travellers for some stages on the road to ruin. One man
must have been upwards of sixty before I first observed
him, and he made then a decent, personable figure in
broad-cloth of the best. For three years he kept falling
- grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted
coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders
growing bowed, the hair falling scant and grey upon his
head; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was
standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment
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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 The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: picture from the wall and looking on the back; and, like the
inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.
1. CHOICE OF WORDS. - The art of literature stands apart
from among its sisters, because the material in which the
literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the
one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the
public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but
hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts
enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the
modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in
mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen
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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 Apology by Xenophon: injustice to men; and on the other, that escape from death was not a
thing, in his opinion, to be clamoured for importunately--on the
contrary, he believed that the time was already come for him to die.
That such was the conclusion to which he had come was made still more
evident later when the case had been decided against him. In the first
place, when called upon to suggest a counter-penalty,[42] he would
neither do so himself nor suffer his friends to do so for him, but
went so far as to say that to propose a counter-penalty was like a
confession of guilt. And afterwards, when his companions wished to
steal him out of prison,[43] he would not follow their lead, but would
seem to have treated the idea as a jest, by asking "whether they
The Apology |
