| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: So in the end, above my heart
Once like the city wild and gay,
The slow white stars will pass by night,
The swift brown birds by day.
VII
Rome
Oh for the rising moon
Over the roofs of Rome,
And swallows in the dusk
Circling a darkened dome!
RIVERS TO THE SEA
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: long strip of looking-glass in the door of his wife's wardrobe.
Then after slipping his braces off his shoulders he pulled up
violently the venetian blind, and leaned his forehead against the
cold window-pane - a fragile film of glass stretched between him
and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable
accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves
unlovely and unfriendly to man.
Mr Verloc felt the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors with a
force approaching to positive bodily anguish. There is no
occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a secret
agent of police. It's like your horse suddenly falling dead under
The Secret Agent |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: "Three thousand francs," said Vervelle in a whisper, as they reached
the last, "but I tell everybody forty thousand."
"Forty thousand for a Titian!" said the artist, aloud. "Why, it is
nothing at all!"
"Didn't I tell you," said Vervelle, "that I had three hundred thousand
francs' worth of pictures?"
"I painted those pictures," said Pierre Grassou in Vervelle's ear,
"and I sold them one by one to Elie Magus for less than ten thousand
francs the whole lot."
"Prove it to me," said the bottle-dealer, "and I double my daughter's
'dot,' for if it is so, you are Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Gerard
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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 Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: I've given, I see, an impression that I want to make simply a
hotch-potch of anecdotes and experiences with my uncle swimming
in the middle as the largest lump of victual. I'll own that
here, with the pen already started, I realise what a fermenting
mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and theories
formed I've got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my
book must be from the very outset. I suppose what I'm really
trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life--as one man
has found it. I want to tell--MYSELF, and my impressions of the
thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel intensely of
the laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society, and how
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