| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue
out of doors that should dare to call him comrade!
Old Baltus Van Tassel moved about among his guests with a
face dilated with content and goodhumor, round and jolly as the
harvest moon. His hospitable attentions were brief, but
expressive, being confined to a shake of the hand, a slap on the
shoulder, a loud laugh, and a pressing invitation to "fall to,
and help themselves."
And now the sound of the music from the common room, or
hall, summoned to the dance. The musician was an old gray-headed
negro, who had been the itinerant orchestra of the neighborhood
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: manifest cause, but above all things he must keep his hands off the
property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their
father than the loss of their patrimony. Besides, pretexts for taking
away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live
by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to
others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more
difficult to find and sooner lapse. But when a prince is with his
army, and has under control a multitude of soldiers, then it is quite
necessary for him to disregard the reputation of cruelty, for without
it he would never hold his army united or disposed to its duties.
Among the wonderful deeds of Hannibal this one is enumerated: that
The Prince |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: "This turned out to be true. And I am not sure that the business man had
not known it all the while. 'We looked over the property pretty
thoroughly at the time of the Tamarack excitement,' he said. And in a few
days more, in fact, it was generally known that this land had returned to
its old state of not quite paying the taxes."
"Then I paid my visit to Mr. Beverly, but with no cowhide. 'Mr. Beverly,'
said I, 'I want to announce to you my engagement to Miss Ethel Lansing,
whose Michigan copper land you have lately acquired. I hope that you
bought some for your mother.'"
"Those," concluded Mr. Richard Field, "are the circumstances attending my
engagement which I felt might interest you. And now, Ethel, tell your
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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 Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by the
circumstance of its coinciding with a stretch of decorous silence.
They couldn't talk without disturbing the spectators in the part
of the balcony just below them; and it, for that matter, came to
Strether--being a thing of the sort that did come to him--that
these were the accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed
tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to conditions, usually
brilliant, in which relief has to await its time. Relief was never
quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such
people, and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those,
you could yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a
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