| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is his home; THERE
lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though
it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as
prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs
them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the
land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another
world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the
landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep
between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of
land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very
pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
Moby Dick |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: fears for the future; the doctor said that precautions were necessary
for his lungs--the suggestion of a terrible idea which had put the
mother's heart in mourning. Hardly had Jacques begun to convalesce,
and she could breathe again, when Madeleine made them all uneasy. That
pretty plant, whose bloom had lately rewarded the mother's culture,
was now frail and pallid and anemic. The countess, worn-out by
Jacques' long illness, found no courage, she said, to bear this
additional blow, and the ever present spectacle of these two dear
failing creatures made her insensible to the redoubled torment of her
husband's temper. Thus the storms were again raging; tearing up by the
roots the hopes that were planted deepest in her bosom. She was now at
The Lily of the Valley |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Collection of Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter: as fast as he could go, along
a straight walk behind some
black-currant bushes.
Mr. McGregor caught sight
of him at the corner, but Peter
did not care. He slipped underneath
the gate, and was safe at
last in the wood outside the
garden.
MR. McGREGOR hung up
the little jacket and the
|
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 Middlemarch by George Eliot: the best use I can at present make of my profession. But the best
use is not always the same with monetary success. Everything which
has made the Hospital unpopular has helped with other causes--
I think they are all connected with my professional zeal--to make me
unpopular as a practitioner. I get chiefly patients who can't pay me.
I should like them best, if I had nobody to pay on my own side."
Lydgate waited a little, but Bulstrode only bowed, looking at
him fixedly, and he went on with the same interrupted enunciation--
as if he were biting an objectional leek.
"I have slipped into money difficulties which I can see no way out of,
unless some one who trusts me and my future will advance me a sum
Middlemarch |
