| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: Scarlett?"
"You can taste those chitlins already, can't you?" said Scarlett
with a grin. "Well, I can taste fresh pork myself and if the
weather holds for a few days more, we'll--"
Melanie interrupted, her spoon at her lips,
"Listen, dear! Somebody's coming!"
"Somebody hollerin'," said Pork uneasily.
On the crisp autumn air came clear the sound of horse's hooves,
thudding as swiftly as a frightened heart, and a woman's voice,
high pitched, screaming: "Scarlett! Scarlett!"
Eye met eye for a dreadful second around the table before chairs
Gone With the Wind |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: face of a fiend. Then before I could find time even to wonder, he
had sprung from his horse and stood within three paces of me.
'A lucky day! Now we will see what truth there is in prophecies,'
he said, drawing his silver-mounted sword. 'A name for a name;
Juan de Garcia gives you greeting, Thomas Wingfield.'
Now, strange as it may seem, it was at this moment only that there
flashed across my mind the thought of all that I had heard about
the Spanish stranger, the report of whose coming to Yarmouth had
stirred my father and mother so deeply. At any other time I should
have remembered it soon enough, but on this day I was so set upon
my tryst with Lily and what I should say to her, that nothing else
Montezuma's Daughter |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: conscientious people, it is true, pretended to think that the
Reverend Harold Benham was a first husband and long since dead, but
that was all. As a matter of fact, in his increasingly futile way
he wasn't, either at Seagate or in the Educational Supplement of the
TIMES. But even the most conscientious of us are not obliged to go
to Seagate or read the Educational Supplement of the TIMES.
Lady Marayne's plans for her son's future varied very pleasantly.
She was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly
of the large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they
mentioned people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its
imaginative crop upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered
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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 Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: poem:
The lingering clouds' last throng flies over us.
But it was not only community of interests that brought my
father and Afanásyi Afanásyevitch together. The
reason of their intimacy lay in the fact that, as my father
expressed it, they "thought alike with their heart's mind."
I also remember Nikolái Nikoláyevitch Strakhof's
visits. He was a remarkably quiet and modest man. He appeared at
Yásnaya Polyána in the beginning of the seventies,
and from that time on came and stayed with us almost every summer
till he died.
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