| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: has the true Darcy spirit, she may like to have her own way."
As she spoke she observed him looking at her earnestly; and the
manner in which he immediately asked her why she supposed
Miss Darcy likely to give them any uneasiness, convinced her
that she had somehow or other got pretty near the truth. She
directly replied:
"You need not be frightened. I never heard any harm of her; and
I dare say she is one of the most tractable creatures in the world.
She is a very great favourite with some ladies of my
acquaintance, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley. I think I have heard
you say that you know them."
Pride and Prejudice |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: and inexperience I have not got it right.
Forty Years Later
It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this
life together--a longing which shall never perish from the earth,
but shall have place in the heart of every wife that loves,
until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name.
But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I;
for he is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is
to me--life without him would not be life; now could I endure it?
This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up
while my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last wife I
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: Pity me then and wish I were renew'd -
and there are many signs elsewhere of the same feeling, signs
familiar to all real students of Shakespeare.
One point puzzled me immensely as I read the Sonnets, and it was
days before I struck on the true interpretation, which indeed Cyril
Graham himself seems to have missed. I could not understand how it
was that Shakespeare set so high a value on his young friend
marrying. He himself had married young, and the result had been
unhappiness, and it was not likely that he would have asked Willie
Hughes to commit the same error. The boy-player of Rosalind had
nothing to gain from marriage, or from the passions of real life.
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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 Octopus by Frank Norris: the State, leader in a great struggle, consulted, deferred to as
the "Prominent Man," at length attaining that position, so long
and vainly sought for, he yet found no pleasure in his triumph,
and little but bitterness in life. His success had come by
devious methods, had been reached by obscure means.
He was a briber. He could never forget that. To further his
ends, disinterested, public-spirited, even philanthropic as those
were, he had connived with knavery, he, the politician of the old
school, of such rigorous integrity, who had abandoned a "career"
rather than compromise with honesty. At this eleventh hour,
involved and entrapped in the fine-spun web of a new order of
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