| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: left you,--because you are balked in your puny hope! Look at
these women. What is their loss, do you think? Go back, will
you, and drone out your life whimpering over your lost dream, and
go to Shakspeare for tragedy when you want it? Tragedy! Come
here,--let me hear what you call this."
He led her through the passage, up a narrow flight of stairs. An
old woman in a flaring cap sat at the top, nodding,--wakening now
and then, to rock herself to and fro, and give the shrill Irish
keen.
"You know that stoker who was killed in the mill a month ago? Of
course not,--what are such people to you? There was a girl who
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Richard III by William Shakespeare: Will to your mother, to entreat of her
To meet you at the Tower and welcome you.
YORK. What, will you go unto the Tower, my lord?
PRINCE. My Lord Protector needs will have it so.
YORK. I shall not sleep in quiet at the Tower.
GLOUCESTER. Why, what should you fear?
YORK. Marry, my uncle Clarence' angry ghost.
My grandam told me he was murder'd there.
PRINCE. I fear no uncles dead.
GLOUCESTER. Nor none that live, I hope.
PRINCE. An if they live, I hope I need not fear.
Richard III |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: since Juste and I could set out.
Marcas, like us, was in the most abject poverty. He earned, indeed,
his daily bread, but he had neither linen, clothes, nor shoes. He did
not make himself out any better than he was; his dreams had been of
luxury as well as of power. He did not admit that this was the real
Marcas; he abandoned this person, indeed, to the caprices of life.
What he lived by was the breath of ambition; he dreamed of revenge
while blaming himself for yielding to so shallow a feeling. The true
statesman ought, above all things, to be superior to vulgar passions;
like the man of science. It was in these days of dire necessity that
Marcas seemed to us so great--nay, so terrible; there was something
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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 Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: the lagoon within--and clear over that again to where the far
side of the atoll prolonged its pencilling of trees against the
morning sky. He tortured himself to find analogies. The isle was
like the rim of a great vessel sunken in the waters; it was like
the embankment of an annular railway grown upon with wood: so
slender it seemed amidst the outrageous breakers, so frail and
pretty, he would scarce have wondered to see it sink and
disappear without a sound, and the waves close smoothly over
its descent.
Meanwhile the captain was in the forecross-trees, glass in
hand, his eyes in every quarter, spying for an entrance, spying
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