| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: He studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than
he thought he had reason to believe it. He never conceived a
respect for the world, because he had begun with no idols that it
had smashed.
He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in
at a mission church where a man composed his sermons of "yous."
While they got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where he
calculated they stood with the Lord. Many of the sinners were
impatient over the pictured depths of their degradation. They were
waiting for soup-tickets.
A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: The old lady was not in the drawing-room. When the young girl
found herself there, alone with the painter, she brought a chair
to stand on, to take down the picture; but perceiving that she
could not unhook it without setting her foot on the chest of
drawers, she turned to Hippolyte, and said with a blush:
"I am not tall enough. Will you get it down?"
A feeling of modesty, betrayed in the expression of her face and
the tones of her voice, was the real motive of her request; and
the young man, understanding this, gave her one of those glances
of intelligence which are the sweetest language of love. Seeing
that the painter had read her soul, Adelaide cast down her eyes
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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 Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: assembled to destroy all the fish in the river. I was induced at
last to lend the rod to the sneering scoundrel, to see what he would
make of it; and he not only half-filled my basket in an hour, but
literally taught me to kill two trouts with my own hand."
Thus ancient and well-authenticated is the superstition of the
angling powers of the barefooted country-boy,--in fiction.
Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, in that valuable but over-capitalized
book, MY NOVEL, makes use of Fishing for Allegorical Purposes. The
episode of John Burley and the One-eyed Perch not only points a
Moral but adorns the Tale.
In the works of R. D. Blackmore, angling plays a less instructive
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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 Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: her brother, in the same clucking, half-inarticulate voice, as it
sounded to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers
in his black overcoat.
He had removed his overcoat by the time they sat round the dinner-
table, but nevertheless he looked very strange among the others. A
country life and breeding had preserved in them all a look which Mary
hesitated to call either innocent or youthful, as she compared them,
now sitting round in an oval, softly illuminated by candlelight; and
yet it was something of the kind, yes, even in the case of the Rector
himself. Though superficially marked with lines, his face was a clear
pink, and his blue eyes had the long-sighted, peaceful expression of
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