| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: addressed to himself, with a seal still unbroken. "This, I recognize,
is from the headmaster, and the headmaster's an awful bore.
Read him, please; deal with him; but mind you don't report.
Not a word. I'm off!" I broke the seal with a great effort--
so great a one that I was a long time coming to it;
took the unopened missive at last up to my room and only
attacked it just before going to bed. I had better have let it
wait till morning, for it gave me a second sleepless night.
With no counsel to take, the next day, I was full of distress;
and it finally got so the better of me that I determined
to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own
right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other
purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely
philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble
in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or
to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to
seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with
a legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most
cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit;
it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of
Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second is
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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 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: He walked just before her in the narrow path, swinging the hurricane
lamp low, revealing the wet grass, the black shiny tree-roots like
snakes, wan flowers. For the rest, all was grey rain-mist and complete
darkness.
'Tha mun come to the cottage one time,' he said, 'shall ta? We might as
well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.'
It puzzled her, his queer, persistent wanting her, when there was
nothing between them, when he never really spoke to her, and in spite
of herself she resented the dialect. His 'tha mun come' seemed not
addressed to her, but some common woman. She recognized the foxglove
leaves of the riding and knew, more or less, where they were.
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
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 Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed by Edna Ferber: Then one can be quite sure that the spring is here. Who
can look at a great bed of red and pink and lavender and
yellow tulips and hyacinths, and doubt it? Come."
With a quick gesture she threw a shawl over her head,
and beckoned me. Together we stepped out into the chill
of the raw March afternoon. She stood a moment, silent,
gazing over the sodden earth. Then she flitted swiftly
down the narrow path, and halted before a queer little
structure of brick, covered with the skeleton of a
creeping vine. Stooping, Alma Pflugel pulled open the
rusty iron door and smiled up at me.
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