| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: with a little stab of pain. It might not be the same headache,
but she certainly had a headache. She turned from side to side,
in the hope that the coolness of the sheets would cure her, and that
when she next opened her eyes to look the room would be as usual.
After a considerable number of vain experiments, she resolved to put
the matter beyond a doubt. She got out of bed and stood upright,
holding on to the brass ball at the end of the bedstead.
Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of her hand,
and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of the floor
proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk
than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: boys and girls, in schools and cloisters, with learned, pious men
as teachers, that they might all be well trained, and so the
older people give a good example and Christendom be filled and
adorned with fine young people. So St. Paul teaches his disciple
Titus, that he should rightly instruct and govern all classes,
young and old, men and women. But now he goes to school who
wishes; he is taught who governs and teaches himself; nay, it
has, alas! come to such a pass that the places where good should
be taught have become schools of knavery, and no one at all takes
thought for the wild youth.
VIII. If the above order prevailed, one could say how honor 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 The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: that whisper warmly in the shadows. Then he sat up in his little
bed suddenly, very alert, with his heart beating very fast and a
quiver in his body from top to toe. He had made up his mind. He
knew now that he was going to wear his suit as it should be worn.
He had no doubt in the matter. He was afraid, terribly afraid, but
glad, glad.
He got out of his bed and stood a moment by the window looking
at the moonshine-flooded garden and trembling at the thing he meant
to do. The air was full of a minute clamor of crickets and
murmurings, of the infinitesimal shouting of little living things.
He went very gently across the creaking boards, for fear that he
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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 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: why he does not love any particular woman. A man, says one of my
old black-letter law-books, may show divers good reasons, as thus:
He hath not seen the person named in the indictment; she is of
tender age, or the reverse of that; she hath certain personal
disqualifications, - as, for instance, she is a blackamoor, or hath
an ill-favored countenance; or, his capacity of loving being
limited, his affections are engrossed by a previous comer; and so
of other conditions. Not the less is it true that he is bound by
duty and inclined by nature to love each and every woman.
Therefore it is that each woman virtually summons every man to show
cause why he doth not love her. This is not by written document,
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
