| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: they recruit themselves direct with heat and light. During the
time when she was dragging the bag of eggs behind her, the mother,
at the best moments of the day, came and held up her pill to the
sun. With her two hind-legs, she lifted it out of the ground, into
the full light; slowly she turned it and returned it, so that every
side might receive its share of the vivifying rays. Well, this
bath of life, which awakened the germs, is now prolonged to keep
the tender babes active.
Daily, if the sky be clear, the Lycosa, carrying her young, comes
up from the burrow, leans on the kerb and spends long hours basking
in the sun. Here, on their mother's back, the youngsters stretch
The Life of the Spider |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: than let it perish. And the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed
generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it.
These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew
that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen,
perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed
no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration
which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause
of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself
Second Inaugural Address |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: most insidiously destructive figure in these three toilsome
disputes. The Pringle man's soul had apparently missed the normal
distribution of fig-leaves; he was an illiterate, open-eyed,
hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded creature, with large
expository hands, who had come by a side way into the church
because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon
telling the bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness
just exactly what was the matter with his intimate life. The
bishop very earnestly did not want these details, and did his
utmost to avoid the controversial questions that the honest man
pressed respectfully but obstinately upon him.
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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 Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: dreaded the mortifying contempt of silence more than death itself, and
shuddered at the thought of sending his first tender epistle forth to
face so many chances of being thrown on the fire. He was distracted by
innumerable conflicting ideas. But by dint of inventing chimeras,
weaving romances, and cudgeling his brains, he hit at last upon one of
the hopeful stratagems that are sure to occur to your mind if you
persevere long enough, a stratagem which must make clear to the most
inexperienced woman that here was a man who took a fervent interest in
her. The caprice of social conventions puts as many barriers between
lovers as any Oriental imagination can devise in the most delightfully
fantastic tale; indeed, the most extravagant pictures are seldom
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