| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: at sight of which a shout of joy ran through the whole troop: the
cow was brought and sacrificed immediately, and some pieces of flesh
were thrown into these holes. Animated now with assurance of
success, they lose no time: every one redoubles his endeavours, and
the heat, though intolerable, was less powerful than the hopes they
had conceived. At length some, not so patient as the rest, were
weary, and desisted. The work now grew more difficult; they found
nothing but rock, yet continued to toil on, till the prince, having
lost all temper, began to inquire with some passion when he should
have a sight of this treasure, and after having been some time
amused with many promises by the monks, was told that he had not
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in
railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the
Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do
not think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that
dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in
them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I
remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE
WORLD. She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing
outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin. To me in these
habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old
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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 The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: excommunicated by the Pope, were reduced, like Henry IV. at
Canossa, to make a pilgrimage and humbly to sue for the Pope's
forgiveness.
This same law has continually been verified during the course of
history. When at the end of the Roman Empire the military caste
became preponderant, the emperors depended entirely upon their
soldiers, who appointed and deposed them at will.
It was therefore a great advantage for France that she was so
long governed by a monarch almost absolute, supposed to
hold his power by divine right, and surrounded therefore by a
considerable prestige. Without such an authority he could have
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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 Middlemarch by George Eliot: Dorothea sat almost motionless in her meditative struggle,
while the evening slowly deepened into night. But the struggle
changed continually, as that of a man who begins with a movement
towards striking and ends with conquering his desire to strike.
The energy that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted
to inspire a resolved, submission, when the noble habit of the soul
reasserts itself. That thought with which Dorothea had gone
out to meet her husband--her conviction that he had been asking
about the possible arrest of all his work, and that the answer
must have wrung his heart, could not be long without rising beside
the image of him, like a shadowy monitor looking at her anger
Middlemarch |
