| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: with it into the great city, - one to a cleft in the pavement, one
to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich
gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where
nothing but a man is buried, - and there they grow, looking down on
the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between
the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-
railings. Listen to them, when there is only a light breath
stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other, - "Wait
awhile!" The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green
lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach
the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm: Then the fox stretched out his tail, and so away they went over stock
and stone till their hair whistled again.
As they came to the castle, all was as the fox had said, and at twelve
o'clock the young man met the princes going to the bath and gave her
the kiss, and she agreed to run away with him, but begged with many
tears that he would let her take leave of her father. At first he
refused, but she wept still more and more, and fell at his feet, till
at last he consented; but the moment she came to her father's house
the guards awoke and he was taken prisoner again.
Then he was brought before the king, and the king said, 'You shall
never have my daughter unless in eight days you dig away the hill that
Grimm's Fairy Tales |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: shining floor might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I
went rapidly to meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian:
"The garden, the garden--do me the pleasure to tell me if it's yours!"
She stopped short, looking at me with wonder; and then, "Nothing here
is mine," she answered in English, coldly and sadly.
"Oh, you are English; how delightful!" I remarked, ingenuously.
"But surely the garden belongs to the house?"
"Yes, but the house doesn't belong to me." She was a long,
lean, pale person, habited apparently in a dull-colored
dressing gown, and she spoke with a kind of mild literalness.
She did not ask me to sit down, any more than years before
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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: weirdness. And these hushes, these transparencies, do not always
inspire a causeless apprehension: they are omens
sometimes--omens of coming tempest. Nature,--incomprehensible
Sphinx!--before her mightiest bursts of rage, ever puts forth her
divinest witchery, makes more manifest her awful beauty ...
But in that forgotten summer the witchery lasted many long
days,--days born in rose-light, buried in gold. It was the
height of the season. The long myrtle-shadowed village was
thronged with its summer population;--the big hotel could hardly
accommodate all its guests;--the bathing-houses were too few for
the crowds who flocked to the water morning and evening. There
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