| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Desert Gold by Zane Grey: it--hunger for a mate, for offspring, for life. When it ceased,
the terrible desert silence smote Cameron, and the cry echoed in his soul.
He and that wandering wolf were brothers. Then a sharp clink of metal on
stone and soft pads of hoofs in sand prompted Cameron to reach for his gun,
and to move out of the light of waning campfire. He was somewhere
along the wild border line between Sonora and Arizona; and the
prospector who dared the heat and barrenness of that region risked
other dangers sometimes as menacing.
Figures darker than the gloom approached and took shape, and in
the light turned out to be those of a white man and a heavily
packed burro.
Desert Gold |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: Who walks through fire will hardly heed the smoke.
Ay, go then, an ye must: only one proof,
Before thou ask the King to make thee knight,
Of thine obedience and thy love to me,
Thy mother,--I demand.
And Gareth cried,
'A hard one, or a hundred, so I go.
Nay--quick! the proof to prove me to the quick!'
But slowly spake the mother looking at him,
'Prince, thou shalt go disguised to Arthur's hall,
And hire thyself to serve for meats and drinks
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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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: Beautiful. At such a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural
that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, and still
more old Greece, should usurp the place of the monk, as teacher of
mankind; and that scholars should form, for a while, a new and
powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the more
redoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had been won by
intellect alone.
Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest,
at least feared the "scholar," who held, so the vulgar believed, the
keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built
cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical
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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 Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: San Marco to her p]ace. Then he asked, in a deep voice:
-"Has traido al Doctor?"
-"Si, si!" answered Sparicio... "Y el viejo?"
-"Aye! pobre!" responded Feliu,--"hace tres dias que esta
muerto. "
Henry Edwards was dead!
He had died very suddenly, without a cry or a word, while resting
in his rocking-chair,--the very day after Sparicio had sailed.
They had made him a grave in the marsh,--among the high weeds,
not far from the ruined tomb of the Spanish fisherman. But
Sparicio had fairly earned his hundred dollars.
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