| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: in the mouth with his open palm, and then the others closed
in between them.
"There is some mistake, sir," cried one of the other players.
"Why, this is Count de Coude, of France."
"If I am mistaken," said the accuser, "I shall gladly apologize;
but before I do so first let monsieur le count explain
the extra cards which I saw him drop into his side pocket."
And then the man whom Tarzan had seen drop them there
turned to sneak from the room, but to his annoyance he
found the exit barred by a tall, gray-eyed stranger.
"Pardon," said the man brusquely, attempting to pass to one side.
The Return of Tarzan |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: fixed definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces
at once like a house of cards, and it became clear that the
edifice had been built up out of those transposed words, apart
from anything in life more important than reason.
At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his will
the word love, and for a couple of days this new philosophy
charmed him, till he removed a little away from it. But then,
when he turned from life itself to glance at it again, it fell
away too, and proved to be the same muslin garment with no warmth
in it.
His brother Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to read the theological
Anna Karenina |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: weight of the infection lay, buried 120, whereof though the bills said
but sixty-eight of the plague, everybody said there had been 100 at
least, calculating it from the usual number of funerals in that parish,
as above.
Till this week the city continued free, there having never any died,
except that one Frenchman whom I mentioned before, within the
whole ninety-seven parishes. Now there died four within the city, one
in Wood Street, one in Fenchurch Street, and two in Crooked Lane.
Southwark was entirely free, having not one yet died on that side of
the water.
I lived without Aldgate, about midway between Aldgate Church and
A Journal of the Plague Year |
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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: stupidity, the well-known line, which seems incompatible with the
theory both of the letters and of his own Detection; and which has
ere now been brought forward as a fresh proof of Mary's innocence.
And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets: their delicacy,
their grace, their reticence, are so many arguments against their
having been forged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least
of all by one in whose character--whatever his other virtues may
have been--delicacy was by no means the strongest point.
As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must
be said: That even if she, and not Murray, had bestowed on him the
temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely
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