| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: voice stirred through the quantities on the page before me.
I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England
coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.
Before I had got far with my reading, I was disturbed by a knock.
I hurried to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing
in the dark hall.
`I expect you hardly know me, Jim.'
The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she
stepped into the light of my doorway and I beheld--Lena Lingard!
She was so quietly conventionalized by city clothes that I
might have passed her on the street without seeing her.
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: horror filled my heart; perhaps their murdering work was already done
and they were departing.
The minute of suspense--or was it but seconds?--seemed an eternity. But
it ended at last. Now I was at the door in the high wall that enclosed
the outbuildings at the back of the house, and there, by an inspiration,
pulled up the mare--glad enough she was to stop, poor thing--for it
occurred to me that if I rode to the front I should very probably be
assegaied and of no further use. I tried the door, which was made of
stout stinkwood planks. By design, or accident, it had been left
unbolted. As I thrust it open Hans arrived with a rush, clinging to the
roan with his face hidden in its mane. The beast pulled up by the side
Marie |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: ask you," continued Madame Clapart, returning to her son. "You can't
please Madame Moreau, whatever you do; besides, you must be home by
the end of September. We are to go to Belleville, you know, to your
uncle Cardot."
"Yes, mamma."
"Above all," she said, in a low voice, "be sure never to speak about
servants; keep thinking all the time that Madame Moreau was once a
waiting-maid."
"Yes, mamma."
Oscar, like all youths whose vanity is excessively ticklish, seemed
annoyed at being lectured on the threshold of the Lion d'Argent.
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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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: so far as he might, to know, and she had even in a sort denied the
power in him to learn: which were so many things, precisely, to
deprive him of rest. It wasn't that he wanted, he argued for
fairness, that anything past and done should repeat itself; it was
only that he shouldn't, as an anticlimax, have been taken sleeping
so sound as not to be able to win back by an effort of thought the
lost stuff of consciousness. He declared to himself at moments
that he would either win it back or have done with consciousness
for ever; he made this idea his one motive in fine, made it so much
his passion that none other, to compare with it, seemed ever to
have touched him. The lost stuff of consciousness became thus for
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