| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: "So much that I might hear what thou art singing.
Thou makest me remember where and what
Proserpina that moment was when lost
Her mother her, and she herself the Spring."
As turns herself, with feet together pressed
And to the ground, a lady who is dancing,
And hardly puts one foot before the other,
On the vermilion and the yellow flowerets
She turned towards me, not in other wise
Than maiden who her modest eyes casts down;
And my entreaties made to be content,
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: nothing in experience to warm up your nerves like a lion at close
quarters, unless it is a wounded buffalo; and I became still more so
when I made out through the smoke that the lions were all moving about
on the extreme edge of the reeds. Occasionally they would pop their
heads out like rabbits from a burrow, and then, catching sight of me
standing about fifty yards away, draw them back again. I knew that it
must be getting pretty warm behind them, and that they could not keep
the game up for long; and I was not mistaken, for suddenly all four of
them broke cover together, the old black-maned lion leading by a few
yards. I never saw a more splendid sight in all my hunting experience
than those four lions bounding across the veldt, overshadowed by the
Long Odds |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: some more. He carried me in the coach to the Spring Garden,
at Knightsbridge, where we walked in the gardens, and he
treated me very handsomely; but I found he drank very freely.
He pressed me also to drink, but I decline it.
Hitherto he kept his word with me, and offered me nothing
amiss. We came away in the coach again, and he brought me
into the streets, and by this time it was near ten o'clock at
night, and he stopped the coach at a house where, it seems,
he was acquainted, and where they made no scruple to show
us upstairs into a room with a bed in it. At first I seemed to
be unwilling to go up, but after a few words I yielded to that
Moll Flanders |
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 Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart: him dead in his bed, but there was blood on the floor in the next
room. I washed it up myself."
"Of course," she added, when Bassett maintained a puzzled silence,
"I may be all wrong. He might have fallen in the next room and
dragged himself to bed. But he was very neatly covered up."
"It's your idea, then, that this boy put him into the bed?"
"I don't know. He wasn't seen about the place. He's never been
here since. But the posse found a horse with the Livingstone
brand, saddled, dead in Dry River Canyon when it was looking for
Judson Clark. Of course, that was a month later. The men here,
Bill and Jake, claimed it had wandered off, but I've often wondered."
The Breaking Point |
