| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm: birth, she scorned him, and required him first to perform another
task. She went down into the garden and strewed with her own hands ten
sacksful of millet-seed on the grass; then she said: 'Tomorrow morning
before sunrise these must be picked up, and not a single grain be
wanting.'
The youth sat down in the garden and considered how it might be
possible to perform this task, but he could think of nothing, and
there he sat sorrowfully awaiting the break of day, when he should be
led to death. But as soon as the first rays of the sun shone into the
garden he saw all the ten sacks standing side by side, quite full, and
not a single grain was missing. The ant-king had come in the night
Grimm's Fairy Tales |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: "And he must look upon you as already pro-
vided for, in a manner. That's the best of it with
the girls. The husbands . . ." He winked. Miss
Bessie, absorbed in her knitting, coloured faintly.
"Bessie! my hat!" old Carvil bellowed out sud-
denly. He had been sitting under the tree mute
and motionless, like an idol of some remarkably
monstrous superstition. He never opened his
mouth but to howl for her, at her, sometimes about
her; and then he did not moderate the terms of his
abuse. Her system was never to answer him at all;
To-morrow |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: which Melanie was offering Tara. Scarlett certainly had no
intention of feeding another mouth. She started to say this but
something in Melanie's stricken face halted the words.
"She wouldn't come, Melly," she amended. "You know she wouldn't.
She's so proud and she'd think it was charity."
"That's true, that's true!" said Melanie distractedly, watching the
small cloud of red dust disappear down the road.
"You've been with me for months," thought Scarlett grimly, looking
at her sister-in-law, "and it's never occurred to you that it's
charity you're living on. And I guess it never will. You're one
of those people the war didn't change and you go right on thinking
Gone With the Wind |
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 Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: more or less, to live--go through the back streets of any city, or
through whole districts of the "black countries" of England; and
then ask himself: Is it the will of God that His human children
should live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such dark places
of the earth? Lot him ask himself: Can they live and toil there
without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without
contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which
craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own
stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, by rail, certain
parts of the iron-producing country--streets of furnaces,
collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt--
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