| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: Proclaim to us their heaviness and wrong
In sweeping sadness of the winds that give
Thy strings no rest from weariless wild hands.
To Erinna
Was Time not harsh to you, or was he kind,
O pale Erinna of the perfect lyre,
That he has left no word of singing fire
Whereby you waked the dreaming Lesbian wind,
And kindled night along the lyric shore?
O girl whose lips Erato stooped to kiss,
Do you go sorrowing because of this
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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 Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving: room in which he was confined, to hear if possible some news of
the result. At last M. Pelletan obtained permission to inform
him of the verdict of the doctors. It was favourable to
Castaing; no trace of death by violence or poison had been
discovered.
The medical men declared death to be due to an inflammation of
the stomach, which could be attributed to natural causes; that
the inflammation had subsided; that it had been succeeded by
cerebral inflammation, which frequently follows inflammation of
the stomach, and may have been aggravated in this case by
exposure to the sun or by over-indulgence of any kind.
A Book of Remarkable Criminals |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: unwitting, began to reach me. I went to Wimbledon at times because
Saltram was there, and I went at others because he wasn't. The
Pudneys, who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of
him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless,
in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear
wandered on the storm-lashed heath. His room, upstairs, had been
lately done up (I could hear the crackle of the new chintz) and the
difference only made his smirches and bruises, his splendid tainted
genius, the more tragic. If he wasn't barefoot in the mire he was
sure to be unconventionally shod. These were the things Adelaide
and I, who were old enough friends to stare at each other 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 Whirligigs by O. Henry: pens, the uncouth merino rams in their little pasture, the
water-tanks I prepared against the summer drought --
giving account of his stewardship with a boyish enthus-
siasm that never flagged.
Where was the old Teddy that she knew so well? This
side of him was the same, and it was a side that pleased
her; but this was all she ever saw of him now. Where
was his sentimentality -- those old, varying moods of
impetuous love-making, of fanciful, quixotic devotion, of
heart-breaking gloom, of alternating, absurd tenderness
and haughty dignity? His nature had been a sensitive
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