| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: Paul looked up and laughed.
"We've both got plenty of life in us yet to make things fly,"
he said.
The eyes of the two men met. They exchanged one look.
Having recognised the stress of passion each in the other, they both
drank their whisky.
"Yes, begod!" said Dawes, breathless.
There was a pause.
"And I don't see," said Paul, "why you shouldn't go on where
you left off."
"What---" said Dawes, suggestively.
Sons and Lovers |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter: house in a hurry. His whiskers bristled
and his coat collar stood on
end with rage.
For the next twenty minutes Mr.
Tod kept creeping cautiously into
the house, and retreating hurriedly
out again. By degrees he ventured
further in--right into the bed-
room. When he was outside the
house, he scratched up the earth
with fury. But when he was inside
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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 My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: know--your forgiveness may perhaps preserve for penitence the
dregs of a wretched life.'
"'Ha!' said the lady, as a sudden light broke on her, 'it is the
villain himself!' And grasping Sir Philip Forester--for it was
he, and no other--by the collar, she raised a cry of 'Murder,
murder! seize the murderer!'
"At an exclamation so singular, in such a place, the company
thronged into the apartment; but Sir Philip Forester was no
longer there. He had forcibly extricated himself from Lady
Bothwell's hold, and had run out of the apartment, which opened
on the landing-place of the stair. There seemed no escape in
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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 Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: managed to divert attention from the real business of the picture
to some pretty irrelevance of detail. Mrs. Gisburn, presenting a
neutral surface to work on--forming, as it were, so inevitably
the background of her own picture--had lent herself in an unusual
degree to the display of this false virtuosity. The picture was
one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it--it
represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of
veins, a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one
of the circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met,
in short, at every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted
"strongly" because she was tired of being painted "sweetly"--and
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