| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: returned at full speed to his uncle's house, spurred by the only idea,
a clear-cut, simple idea, which was able to piece and penetrate his
dull brain. Finding the house invaded by the three families, now
masters of the place, he trembled lest he should be unable to
accomplish a project to which he gave no reflection whatever, except
so far as to fear the obstacles.
"What are you doing here?" he said to Massin and Cremiere. "We can't
leave the house and the property to be pillaged. We are the heirs, but
we can't camp here. You, Cremiere, go to Dionis at once and tell him
to come and certify to the death; I can't draw up the mortuary
certificate for an uncle, though I am assistant-mayor. You, Massin, go
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: I hinted at before: namely, that there was a seeming propensity or a
wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others.
There have been great debates among our physicians as to the
reason of this. Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease,
and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of
a rage, and a hatred against their own kind - as if there was a
malignity not only in the distemper to communicate itself, but in the
very nature of man, prompting him with evil will or
an evil eye, that, as they say in the case of a mad dog, who though the
gentlest creature before of any of his kind, yet then will fly upon and
bite any one that comes next him, and those as soon as any who had
A Journal of the Plague Year |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Her most poignant grief, like that of her father, was for
the dead king, Leopold; but to the sorrow of the loyal sub-
ject was added the grief of the loving woman, bereft. Close
to her heart she hugged the memory of the brief hours spent
with the man whom she had been taught since childhood to
look upon as her future husband, but for whom the all-
consuming fires of love had only been fanned to life within
her since that moment, now three weeks gone, that he had
crushed her to his breast to cover her lips with kisses for
the short moment ere he sacrificed his life to save her from a
fate worse than death.
The Mad King |
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 Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: him in carrying it on; and there he settled down, a kind,
talkative, inscrutable young man, six feet three in his stockings,
with an iron constitution and a friendly voice. He soon began to
take rank in the district as a bit of an oddity: it was not much to
be wondered at from the first, for he was always full of notions,
and kept calling the plainest common-sense in question; but what
most raised the report upon him was the odd circumstance of his
courtship with the parson's Marjory.
The parson's Marjory was a lass about nineteen, when Will would be
about thirty; well enough looking, and much better educated than
any other girl in that part of the country, as became her
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