| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: A glow from the fire threw red hues over the bare floor, the cracked
and soiled plastering, and the overturned and broken furniture.
In the middle of the floor lay his mother asleep. In one
corner of the room his father's limp body hung across the seat
of a chair.
The urchin stole forward. He began to shiver in dread of
awakening his parents. His mother's great chest was heaving
painfully. Jimmie paused and looked down at her. Her face was
inflamed and swollen from drinking. Her yellow brows shaded eye-
lids that had brown blue. Her tangled hair tossed in waves over
her forehead. Her mouth was set in the same lines of vindictive
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Reef by Edith Wharton: seemed to simplify the incident, now turned out to be its
most galling complication. The bare truth, indeed, was that
he had hardly thought of her at all, either at the time or
since, and that he was ashamed to base his judgement of her
on his meagre memory of their adventure.
The essential cheapness of the whole affair--as far as his
share in it was concerned--came home to him with humiliating
distinctness. He would have liked to be able to feel that,
at the time at least, he had staked something more on it,
and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more palpable loss to
show. But the plain fact was that he hadn't spent a penny
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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 Silas Marner by George Eliot: soon begun to court Miss Osgood, that's the sister o' the Mr. Osgood
as now is, and a fine handsome lass she was--eh, you can't think--
they pretend this young lass is like her, but that's the way wi'
people as don't know what come before 'em. _I_ should know, for I
helped the old rector, Mr. Drumlow as was, I helped him marry 'em."
Here Mr. Macey paused; he always gave his narrative in instalments,
expecting to be questioned according to precedent.
"Aye, and a partic'lar thing happened, didn't it, Mr. Macey, so as
you were likely to remember that marriage?" said the landlord, in
a congratulatory tone.
"I should think there did--a _very_ partic'lar thing," said
Silas Marner |
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 Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: got into brunt his very banes; whiles he slept, and whiles he
waukened; whiles he heard the time o' nicht, and whiles a tyke
yowlin' up the muir, as if somebody was deid; whiles he thocht he
heard bogles claverin' in his lug, an' whiles he saw spunkies in
the room. He behoved, he judged, to be sick; an' sick he was -
little he jaloosed the sickness.
At the hinder end, he got a clearness in his mind, sat up in his
sark on the bed-side, and fell thinkin' ance mair o' the black man
an' Janet. He couldnae weel tell how - maybe it was the cauld to
his feet - but it cam' in upon him wi' a spate that there was some
connection between thir twa, an' that either or baith o' them were
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