| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: cried the father, seeing that Christophe was about to reply. "My son,
I have plans for your future which you will not upset by making
yourself useful to Queen Catherine; but, heavens and earth! don't risk
your head. Messieurs de Guise would cut it off as easily as the
Burgundian cuts a turnip, and then those persons who are now employing
you will disown you utterly."
"I know that, father," said Christophe.
"What! are you really so strong, my son? You know it, and are willing
to risk all?"
"Yes, father."
"By the powers above us!" cried the father, pressing his son in his
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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 Rescue by Joseph Conrad: Mrs. Travers say rapidly with a kind of fervour:
"Don't go, pray; don't stop them. Oh! This is truth--this is
anger--something real at last."
D'Alcacer leaned back at once against the rail.
Then Mr. Travers, with one arm extended, repeated very loudly:
"Nothing more to say. Leave my ship at once!"
And directly the black dog, stretched at his wife's feet, muzzle
on paws and blinking yellow eyes, growled discontentedly at the
noise. Mrs. Travers laughed a faint, bright laugh, that seemed to
escape, to glide, to dart between her white teeth. D'Alcacer,
concealing his amazement, was looking down at her gravely: and
The Rescue |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: left, nor heard speech of any one, but thought upon the thought of
the morrow. And her nurse fed her in silence, and she took of the
food with her left hand, and ate it without grace.
Now when the nine years were out, it fell dusk in the autumn, and
there came a sound in the wind like a sound of piping. At that the
nurse lifted up her finger in the vaulted house.
"I hear a sound in the wind," said she, "that is like the sound of
piping."
"It is but a little sound," said the King's daughter, "but yet is
it sound enough for me."
So they went down in the dusk to the doors of the house, and along
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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 Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: chanced to be on the hither side of the gorges when the world had
so terribly shaken itself, and he perforce had to forget his wife
and his child and all the friends and possessions he had left up
there, and start life over again in the lower world. He started it
again but ill, blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment in
the mines; but the story he told begot a legend that lingers along
the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.
He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness,
into which he had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a
vast bale of gear, when he was a child. The valley, he said, had
in it all that the heart of man could desire--sweet water, pasture,
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