| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: she acts, she is always swayed by one dominant passion; and wonderful
it is to see how she makes that passion the very centre of her world.
"Tullia was irresistible; she twisted du Bruel round her fingers, the
sky grew blue again, the evening was glorious. And ingenious writer of
plays as he is, he never so much as saw that his wife had buried a
trouble out of sight.
" 'Such is life, my dear fellow,' he said to me, 'ups and downs and
contrasts.'
" 'Especially life off the stage,' I put in.
" 'That is just what I mean,' he continued. 'Why, but for these
violent emotions, one would be bored to death! Ah! that woman has the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: temptation to go out and fight. Our force must be here, to
protect ourselves. I see panic rising among the whites; I
hear the shrill note of it in their voices, and they talk
already about a refuge on the war ships. There are two here,
both German; and the ORLANDO is expected presently.
SUNDAY 9TH JULY.
Well, the war has at last begun. For four or five days, Apia
has been filled by these poor children with their faces
blacked, and the red handkerchief about their brows, that
makes the Malietoa uniform, and the boats have been coming in
from the windward, some of them 50 strong, with a drum and a
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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 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: marked under her dress, and the question involuntarily rose to
the mind where in the undulating, piled-up mountain of material
at the back the real body of the woman, so small and slender, so
naked in front, and so hidden behind and below, really came to an
end.
Betsy made haste to introduce her to Anna.
"Only fancy, we all but ran over two soldiers," she began telling
them at once, using her eyes, smiling and twitching away her
tail, which she flung back at one stroke all on one side. "I
drove here with Vaska.... Ah, to be sure, you don't know each
other." And mentioning his surname she introduced the young man,
Anna Karenina |
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 Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: continues through century after century; how this king or
that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole
generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even
feel as if we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because
our interest is not in the men, but in the country that they
loved or hated, benefited or injured. And so it is here:
Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we regard them no more
than the lost armies of which we find the cold statistics in
military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it is
the principle that put these men where they were, that filled
them for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power,
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