| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.
DOORYARD ROSES
I HAVE come the selfsame path
To the selfsame door,
Years have left the roses there
Burning as before.
While I watch them in the wind
Quick the hot tears start--
Strange so frail a flame outlasts
Fire in the heart.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: capitals of the little States which made up the France of an older
day.
First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are regarded as
incontestable, and of the highest antiquity in the department, though
no one has so much as heard of them a bare fifty leagues away. This
species of royal family on a small scale is distantly, but
unmistakably, connected with the Navarreins and the Grandlieu family,
and related to the Cadignans, and the Blamont-Chauvrys. The head of
the illustrious house is invariably a determined sportsman. He has no
manners, crushes everybody else with his nominal superiority,
tolerates the sub-prefect much as he submits to the taxes, 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 Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: seeing Alice. `Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as
you came through the wood?'
`Yes, I did,' said Alice: `several thousand, I should think.'
`Four thousand two hundred and seven, that's the exact number,'
the King said, referring to his book. `I couldn't send all the
horses, you know, because two of them are wanted in the game.
And I haven't sent the two Messengers, either. They're both gone
to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can
see either of them.'
`I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.
`I only wish _I_ had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful
Through the Looking-Glass |
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 Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned
on the boarding, headed respectively "Funnel No. 1," and
"Funnel No. 2," but with the tails torn away. The window,
sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly
smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor,
a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely
prospering in the interior. It was my first care to cut away
that poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance.
That was our first improvement by which we took possession.
The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank
propped against the threshold, along which the intruder must
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