| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Emma by Jane Austen: will conclude, immediately opened to me the happiest prospects,
I should not have presumed on such early measures, but from the
very particular circumstances, which left me not an hour to lose.
I should myself have shrunk from any thing so hasty, and she would have
felt every scruple of mine with multiplied strength and refinement.--
But I had no choice. The hasty engagement she had entered into with
that woman--Here, my dear madam, I was obliged to leave off abruptly,
to recollect and compose myself.--I have been walking over the country,
and am now, I hope, rational enough to make the rest of my letter
what it ought to be.--It is, in fact, a most mortifying retrospect
for me. I behaved shamefully. And here I can admit, that my manners
Emma |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: And for ever in the hill-recesses
Her more lovely music
Broods and dies.
O to mount again where erst I haunted;
Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted,
And the low green meadows
Bright with sward;
And when even dies, the million-tinted,
And the night has come, and planets glinted,
Lo, the valley hollow
Lamp-bestarred!
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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 Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: though she had known the pains of tyranny, of ridicule,
and neglect, yet almost every recurrence of either had led
to something consolatory: her aunt Bertram had spoken
for her, or Miss Lee had been encouraging, or, what was yet
more frequent or more dear, Edmund had been her champion
and her friend: he had supported her cause or explained
her meaning, he had told her not to cry, or had given her
some proof of affection which made her tears delightful;
and the whole was now so blended together, so harmonised
by distance, that every former affliction had its charm.
The room was most dear to her, and she would not have
Mansfield Park |
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 Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a
dead body by the vapours of its own decomposition. This is
literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last,
and fatalest sign of it, is that "puffing up." Your converted
children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who
teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in
cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking to the
fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar
people and messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and
great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as
they think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong;
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