| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: lined with horse-hair soles, and by a more frequent change of linen.
His artless gaiety, long suppressed by noble and decent poverty,
reappeared. He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches
in his German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said
with an air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a
laugh to the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy
had penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself wilfully
ridiculous had he failed in being so by nature.
According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young
girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There
they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of
the parts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a
throbbing pendulum. We must not, in things temporal, take
from those who have little, the little that they have; the
merits of prose are inferior, but they are not the same; it
is a little kingdom, but an independent.
3. RHYTHM OF THE PHRASE. - Some way back, I used a word
which still awaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was
to be comely; but what is a comely phrase? In all ideal and
material points, literature, being a representative art, must
look for analogies to painting and the like; but in what is
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker: By the next morning, daylight showed the actual danger which
threatened. From every part of the eastern counties reports were
received concerning the enormous immigration of birds. Experts were
sending--on their own account, on behalf of learned societies, and
through local and imperial governing bodies--reports dealing with
the matter, and suggesting remedies.
The reports closer to home were even more disturbing. All day long
it would seem that the birds were coming thicker from all quarters.
Doubtless many were going as well as coming, but the mass seemed
never to get less. Each bird seemed to sound some note of fear or
anger or seeking, and the whirring of wings never ceased nor
Lair of the White Worm |
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 Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: the island, but in a small kennel at the back of the enclosure.
The creature was scarcely so intelligent as the Ape-man, but far
more docile, and the most human-looking of all the Beast Folk;
and Montgomery had trained it to prepare food, and indeed to
discharge all the trivial domestic offices that were required.
It was a complex trophy of Moreau's horrible skill,--a bear, tainted with
dog and ox, and one of the most elaborately made of all his creatures.
It treated Montgomery with a strange tenderness and devotion.
Sometimes he would notice it, pat it, call it half-mocking, half-jocular
names, and so make it caper with extraordinary delight; sometimes he
would ill-treat it, especially after he had been at the whiskey,
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
