| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: left unfinished;--then, alas! of passionate caresses,--other
blossoming paths that only showed the way to sin, but had never
quite led her there, she fancied. There was so much to tell,
more than could ever be explained or justified. Moment by
moment, farther and farther strayed the wandering thoughts, and
when the poor child looked in Kate's face again, the mist
between them seemed to have grown wide and dense, as if neither
eyes nor words nor hands could ever meet again. When she spoke
it was to say something evasive and unimportant, and her voice
was as one from the grave.
In truth, Philip had given Emilia his heart to play with 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 Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently,
was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and
then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition
of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic
thing "miles high" which walked or lumbered about.
He at no
time fully described this object but occasional frantic words,
as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must
be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict
in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added,
was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy.
Call of Cthulhu |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: "Yes, but exposed--how shall I say?--so directly. So intimately.
That's surely enough."
"Enough to make you feel then--as what we may call the end and the
upshot of our watch--that I'm not afraid?"
"You're not afraid. But it isn't," she said, "the end of our
watch. That is it isn't the end of yours. You've everything still
to see."
"Then why haven't you?" he asked. He had had, all along, to-day,
the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it. As
this was his first impression of that it quite made a date. The
case was the more marked as she didn't at first answer; which in
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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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: Thus we find that Philip, king of Macedon, thinking to terrify the
Achaeans into subjection again, if he could rid his hands of
Philopoemen, employed some persons privately to assassinate him. But
the treachery coming to light, he became infamous, and lost his
character through Greece. The Boeotians besieging Megara, and ready
to carry the town by storm, upon a groundless rumor that Philopoemen
was at hand with succor, ran away, and left their scaling ladders at
the wall behind them. Nabis, (who was tyrant of Lacedaemon after
Machanidas,) had surprised Messene at a time when Philopoemen was out
of command. He tried to persuade Lysippus, then General of the
Achaeans, to succor Messene: but not prevailing with him, because,
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