| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Came from his lips, and that word was her name.
"I heard them saying, Mary, that He wept
Before I woke." The words were low and shaken,
Yet Mary knew that he who uttered them
Was Lazarus; and that would be enough
Until there should be more . . . "Who made Him come,
That He should weep for me? . . . Was it you, Mary?"
The questions held in his incredulous eyes
Were more than she would see. She looked away;
But she had felt them and should feel for ever,
She thought, their cold and lonely desperation
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: and then he saw the mark of a little shoe in the snow,--looking
down at it with a hot panting in his veins, and a strange flash
in his eye, as he walked on steadily.
There was a turn in the path at the top of the hill, a sunken
wall, with a broad stone from which the wind had blown the snow.
This was the place. He sat down on the stone, resting. Just
there she had stood, clutching her little fingers behind her,
when he came up and threw back her hood to look in her face: how
pale and worn it was, even then! He had not looked at her
to-night: he would not, if he had been dying, with those men
standing there. He stood alone in the world with this little
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: made them of a mixture of bone and unfermented flesh, attempered so as to
be in a mean, and gave them a yellow colour; wherefore the sinews have a
firmer and more glutinous nature than flesh, but a softer and moister
nature than the bones. With these God covered the bones and marrow,
binding them together by sinews, and then enshrouded them all in an upper
covering of flesh. The more living and sensitive of the bones he enclosed
in the thinnest film of flesh, and those which had the least life within
them in the thickest and most solid flesh. So again on the joints of the
bones, where reason indicated that no more was required, he placed only a
thin covering of flesh, that it might not interfere with the flexion of our
bodies and make them unwieldy because difficult to move; and also that it
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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 The Voice of the City by O. Henry: bud and blossom conversed with him in the old vocabu-
lary of his careless youth - the inanimate things, the
familiar stones and rails, the gates and furrows and
roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and
a power in the transformation. The country had
smiled and he had felt the breath of it, and his heart
was drawn as if in a moment back to his old love.
The city was far away.
This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley
and possessed him. A queer thing he noticed in con-
nection with it was that Alicia, sitting at his side,
The Voice of the City |
