| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: to keep which I freely, too, could die--I rather say, in fear and
trembling, God help us on whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to
make us free; responsible, each individual of us, not only to
ourselves, but to Him and all mankind. For if we fall we shall fall
I know not whither, and I dare not think.
How those old despotisms, the mighty empires of old time, fell, we
know, and we can easily explain. Corrupt, luxurious, effeminate,
eaten out by universal selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last
no organic coherence. The moral anarchy within showed through, at
last burst through, the painted skin of prescriptive order which
held them together. Some braver and abler, and usually more
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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 Faith of Men by Jack London: her pact, and now it came back to her with behind it all the
childish terror of her father. For a time she lay in fear and
trembling, loath to go, afraid to stay. But in the end the Factor
won the silent victory, and his kindness plus his great muscles and
square jaw, nerved her to disregard Snettishane's call.
But in the morning she arose very much afraid, and went about her
duties in momentary fear of her father's coming. As the day wore
along, however, she began to recover her spirits. John Fox,
soundly berating McLean and McTavish for some petty dereliction of
duty, helped her to pluck up courage. She tried not to let him go
out of her sight, and when she followed him into the huge cache 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 Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: heather - relics of more savage wildness - grew under the walls;
and in many of the enclosures, ragweeds and rushes usurped
supremacy over the scanty herbage; but these were not my property.
Near the top of this hill, about two miles from Linden-Car, stood
Wildfell Hall, a superannuated mansion of the Elizabethan era,
built of dark grey stone, venerable and picturesque to look at, but
doubtless, cold and gloomy enough to inhabit, with its thick stone
mullions and little latticed panes, its time-eaten air-holes, and
its too lonely, too unsheltered situation, - only shielded from the
war of wind and weather by a group of Scotch firs, themselves half
blighted with storms, and looking as stern and gloomy as the Hall
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
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 Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: scales before breakfast, working with stiffened fingers in her
cold little room where there was no room for a stove, and sitting
on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once pink
butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee,
rolls, and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett
at the piano in the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater
and fingerless gloves and holding a hot-water bottle on her
knees. Three rooms beyond, down the stone hall, the Big Soprano,
doing Madama Butterfly in bad German, helped to make an
encircling wall of sound in the center of which one might
practice peacefully.
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