| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: that she had an understanding above the common standard, "and
believe me mad, till you are obliged to acknowledge the contrary."
The woman was no fool, that is, she was superior to her class; nor
had misery quite petrified the life's-blood of humanity, to which
reflections on our own misfortunes only give a more orderly course.
The manner, rather than the expostulations, of Maria made a slight
suspicion dart into her mind with corresponding sympathy, which
various other avocations, and the habit of banishing compunction,
prevented her, for the present, from examining more minutely.
But when she was told that no person, excepting the physician
appointed by her family, was to be permitted to see the lady at
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: a time. I have known him to tie her up early in the
morning, and whip her before breakfast; leave her,
go to his store, return at dinner, and whip her again,
cutting her in the places already made raw with his
cruel lash. The secret of master's cruelty toward
"Henny" is found in the fact of her being almost
helpless. When quite a child, she fell into the fire,
and burned herself horribly. Her hands were so
burnt that she never got the use of them. She could
do very little but bear heavy burdens. She was to
master a bill of expense; and as he was a mean man,
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: but as soon as we sank into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met
were similarly disenchanted. And here is one reason of a dozen,
why the world is dull to dull persons.
In our earlier adventures there was generally something to do, and
that quickened us. Even the showers of rain had a revivifying
effect, and shook up the brain from torpor. But now, when the
river no longer ran in a proper sense, only glided seaward with an
even, outright, but imperceptible speed, and when the sky smiled
upon us day after day without variety, we began to slip into that
golden doze of the mind which follows upon much exercise in the
open air. I have stupefied myself in this way more than once;
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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 Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey: loving, the administering, the spiritual uses of his life had failed.
Hare recalled what the desert had done to his own nature, how it had bred
in him its impulse to fight, to resist, to survive. If he, a stranger of
a few years, could be moulded in the flaming furnace of its fiery life,
what then must be the cast of August Naab, born on the desert, and
sleeping five nights out of seven on the sands for sixty years?
The desert! Hare trembled as he grasped all its meaning. Then he slowly
resolved that meaning. There were the measureless distances to narrow
the eye and teach restraint; the untrodden trails, the shifting sands,
the thorny brakes, the broken lava to pierce the flesh; the heights and
depths, unscalable and unplumbed. And over all the sun, red and burning.
The Heritage of the Desert |
