| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: His body, which had been beautiful in movement and in being,
shrank, did not seem to ripen with the years, but to get mean
and rather despicable. There came over him a look of meanness
and of paltriness. And when the mean-looking elderly man bullied or
ordered the boy about, Arthur was furious. Moreover, Morel's manners
got worse and worse, his habits somewhat disgusting. When the
children were growing up and in the crucial stage of adolescence,
the father was like some ugly irritant to their souls. His manners
in the house were the same as he used among the colliers down pit.
"Dirty nuisance!" Arthur would cry, jumping up and going
straight out of the house when his father disgusted him.
Sons and Lovers |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso: LXXXIV
And gainst his face, where love and pity stand,
To pray him that rich throne of beauty spare,
The cruel man stretched forth his murdering hand,
To spoil those gifts, whereof he had no share:
It seemed remorse and sense was in his brand
Which, lighting flat, to hurt the lad forbare;
But all for naught, gainst him the point he bent
That, what the edge had spared, pierced and rent.
LXXXV
Fierce Solyman that with Godfredo strived
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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 Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: opening pages of the story entitled "Mouche," where he recalls,
among the sweetest memories of his youth, his rollicking canoe
parties upon the Seine, and in the description in "La Vie
Errante" of a night spent on the sea,--"to be alone upon the
water under the sky, through a warm night,"--in which he speaks
of the happiness of those "who receive sensations through the
whole surface of their flesh, as they do through their eyes,
their mouth, their ears, and sense of smell."
His unique and too scanty collection of verses, written in early
youth, contains the two most fearless, I was going to say the
most ingenuous, paeans, perhaps, that have been written since the
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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 Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a runaway
vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. WOULD
she jump, could she, would THAT be a safe placed--this question, at
such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight
lips, her conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue:
would she be, after all, to be squared? He believed on the whole
she would jump; yet his alternations on this subject were the more
especial stuff of his suspense. One thing remained well before
him--a conviction that was in fact to gain sharpness from the
impressions of this evening: that if she SHOULD gather in her
skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage while in motion, he
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