| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: "Some men would do a good deal less."
"Not if they looked at it the way I do. She's the same Nellie I've
always known. What difference does it make to me that she stumbled
in the dark and hurt herself--except that my heart is so much more
tender to her it aches?"
"If you hold to that belief she'll live to see the day when she is
a happy woman again," the journalist prophesied.
"I'm going to teach her to think of it all as only a bad nightmare
she's been through." His jaw clinched again so that the muscles
stood out on his cheeks. "Do you know she won't say a word--not
even to her mother--about who the villain is that betrayed her?
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: his blue socks on the window and the History of Civilisation propped
up on his knees.
"This don't look like getting ready for a wedding at six," I says, to
seem innocent.
"Oh," says Mack, reaching for his tobacco, "that was postponed back to
five o'clock. They sent me over a note saying the hour had been
changed. It's all over now. What made you stay away so long, Andy?"
"You heard about the wedding?" I asks.
"I operated it," says he. "I told you I was justice of the peace. The
preacher is off East to visit his folks, and I'm the only one in town
that can perform the dispensations of marriage. I promised Eddie and
Heart of the West |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: and looked about him.
"How now, brother?" he said. "Dinner?"
"Ay, sot," replied the cook, "dinner it is, and a dry dinner, too,
with neither ale nor bread. But there is little pleasure in the
greenwood now; time was when a good fellow could live here like a
mitred abbot, set aside the rain and the white frosts; he had his
heart's desire both of ale and wine. But now are men's spirits
dead; and this John Amend-All, save us and guard us! but a stuffed
booby to scare crows withal."
"Nay," returned the other, "y' are too set on meat and drinking,
Lawless. Bide ye a bit; the good time cometh."
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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 Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll: such a deed: I will not (as I might) point to the strong moral purpose
of this poem itself, to the arithmetical principles so cautiously
inculcated in it, or to its noble teachings in Natural History--I will
take the more prosaic course of simply explaining how it happened.
The Bellman, who was almost morbidly sensitive about appearances,
used to have the bowsprit unshipped once or twice a week to be revarnished,
and it more than once happened, when the time came for replacing it, that
no one on board could remember which end of the ship it belonged to.
They knew it was not of the slightest use to appeal to the Bellman about it--
he would only refer to his Naval Code, and read out in pathetic tones
Admiralty Instructions which none of them had ever been able to understand--
The Hunting of the Snark |
