| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon the national
statute-book.
Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths
of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own
conservation. It has steadily exerted an influence upon all around
it favorable to its own continuance. And to-day it is so strong
that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law.
Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere
in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility
of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority
of the master, you have the conditions, not out of which slavery
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: all the time he was thinking of Katharine, and marveling at his love.
The tone in which he spoke Mary's name was harsh.
"What is it, Ralph?" she asked, startled by his tone. She looked at
him anxiously, and her little frown showed that she was trying
painfully to understand him, and was puzzled. He could feel her
groping for his meaning, and he was annoyed with her, and thought how
he had always found her slow, painstaking, and clumsy. He had behaved
badly to her, too, which made his irritation the more acute. Without
waiting for him to answer, she rose as if his answer were indifferent
to her, and began to put in order some papers that Mr. Basnett had
left on the table. She hummed a scrap of a tune under her breath, and
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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 Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: heard in the crowd. The guards, more skillful, did greater
execution; but the bourgeois, more numerous, overwhelmed
them with a veritable hurricane of iron. Men fell around him
as they had fallen at Rocroy or at Lerida. Fontrailles, his
aide-de-camp, had an arm broken; his horse had received a
bullet in his neck and he had difficulty in controlling him,
maddened by pain. In short, he had reached that supreme
moment when the bravest feel a shudder in their veins, when
suddenly, in the direction of the Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, the
crowd opened, crying: "Long live the coadjutor!" and Gondy,
in surplice and cloak, appeared, moving tranquilly in the
Twenty Years After |
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 Confidence by Henry James: belonged to the large fraternity of Anglo-Saxon tourists,
and one of whom was young and carried herself very well.
Longueville had his share--or more than his share--of gallantry,
and this incident awakened a regret. If he had gone to the other
inn he might have had charming company: at his own establishment
there was no one but an aesthetic German who smoked bad tobacco
in the dining-room. He remarked to himself that this was always
his luck, and the remark was characteristic of the man;
it was charged with the feeling of the moment, but it was not
absolutely just; it was the result of an acute impression made
by the particular occasion; but it failed in appreciation
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