| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln: recollected that the twins had a branch telephone in their sitting
room; he would have to chance their being awake at that hour.
Barbara McIntyre turned on her pillow and rubbed her sleepy eyes;
surely she had been mistaken in thinking she heard the telephone
bell ringing. Even as she lay striving to listen, she dozed off
again, to be rudely awakened by Helen's voice at her ear.
"Babs!" came the agitated whisper. "The envelope's gone."
"Gone!" Barbara swung out of bed.
"Gone where?"
"Father has it."
Downstairs in the library Mrs. Brewster paused on her entrance by
The Red Seal |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: easy canter, and we soon found ourselves in the depths of the forest.
I say 'we,' for I am certain that I accompanied them though how I managed
to keep up with a cantering lion I am wholly unable to explain.
But I was certainly one of the party when we came upon an old beggar-man
cutting sticks, at whose feet the lion made a profound obeisance,
Sylvie and Bruno at the same moment dismounting, and leaping in to the
arms of their father.
"From bad to worse!" the old man said to himself, dreamily, when the
children had finished their rather confused account of the Ambassador's
visit, gathered no doubt from general report, as they had not seen him
themselves. "From bad to worse! That is their destiny. I see it,
Sylvie and Bruno |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: My woeful self, that did in freedom stand,
And was my own fee-simple, (not in part,)
What with his heart in youth, and youth in art,
Threw my affections in his charmed power,
Reserv'd the stalk, and gave him all my flower.
'Yet did I not, as some my equals did,
Demand of him, nor being desired yielded;
Finding myself in honour so forbid,
With safest distance I mine honour shielded:
Experience for me many bulwarks builded
Of proofs new-bleeding, which remain'd the foil
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: retreated. It was the strangest of all things that now when, by
his taking ten steps and applying his hand to a latch, or even his
shoulder and his knee, if necessary, to a panel, all the hunger of
his prime need might have been met, his high curiosity crowned, his
unrest assuaged - it was amazing, but it was also exquisite and
rare, that insistence should have, at a touch, quite dropped from
him. Discretion - he jumped at that; and yet not, verily, at such
a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but because, much
more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he "jumped" at
it I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that - at the
end indeed of I know not how long - he did move again, he crossed
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