| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: inquiringly toward his companions. Neither had moved. Miss
Lombard stood with her hand on the cord, her lids lowered, her
mouth drooping; the doctor, his strange Thoth-like profile turned
toward his guest, was still lost in rapt contemplation of his
treasure.
Wyant addressed the young girl.
"You are fortunate," he said, "to be the possessor of anything so
perfect."
"It is considered very beautiful," she said coldly.
"Beautiful--BEAUTIFUL!" the doctor burst out. "Ah, the poor,
worn out, over-worked word! There are no adjectives in the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: wars of Carthage and Rome. The small number of the primitive Athenian
citizens (20,000), 'which is about their present number' (Crit.), is
evidently designed to contrast with the myriads and barbaric array of the
Atlantic hosts. The passing remark in the Timaeus that Athens was left
alone in the struggle, in which she conquered and became the liberator of
Greece, is also an allusion to the later history. Hence we may safely
conclude that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato, who
has used the name of Solon and introduced the Egyptian priests to give
verisimilitude to his story. To the Greek such a tale, like that of the
earth-born men, would have seemed perfectly accordant with the character of
his mythology, and not more marvellous than the wonders of the East
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: those freedoms, as, well as the democrats, who had demanded them
all--appeal with full right to the Constitution: Each paragraph of the
Constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower
House-freedom as a generalization, the abolition of freedom as a
specification. Accordingly, so long as the name of freedom was
respected, and only its real enforcement was prevented in a legal way,
of course the constitutional existence of freedom remained uninjured,
untouched, however completely its common existence might be
extinguished.
This Constitution, so ingeniously made invulnerable, was, however, like
Achilles, vulnerable at one point: not in its heel, but in its head, or
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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 Daisy Miller by Henry James: passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced.
He asked himself whether Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness
of innocence, or from her being, essentially, a young person of the
reckless class. It must be admitted that holding one's self to a belief
in Daisy's "innocence" came to seem to Winterbourne more and more a matter
of fine-spun gallantry. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was
angry at finding himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady;
he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her
eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal.
From either view of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late.
She was "carried away" by Mr. Giovanelli.
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