| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know
where to find such a complete list.
I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into
a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood
considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet
thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron
grating which strained the light, I could not help being
struck with the foolishness of that institution which
treated my as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to
be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at
length that this was the best use it could put me to, and
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: When the dusk was wet with dew,
Cleis, did the muses nine
Listen in a silent line
While your mother sang to you?
Did they weep or did they smile
When she crooned to still your cries,
She, a muse in human guise,
Who forsook her lyre awhile?
Did you feel her wild heart beat?
Did the warmth of all the sun
Thro' your little body run
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling: Moravians. The Senecas are a seemly, quiet people, and they'd
had trouble enough from white men - American and English -
during the wars, to keep 'em in that walk. They lived on a
Reservation by themselves away off by their lake. Toby took me
up there, and they treated me as if I was their own blood brother.
Red Jacket said the mark of my bare feet in the dust was just like an
Indian's and my style of walking was similar. I know I took to
their ways all over.'
'Maybe the gipsy drop in your blood helped you?' said Puck.
'Sometimes I think it did,' Pharaoh went on. 'Anyhow, Red
Jacket and Cornplanter, the other Seneca chief, they let me be
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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 Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: mingled with music and the murmur of conversation; and to put the
finishing touch to the vertigo of that multitude, intoxicated by all
the seductions the world can offer, a perfume-laden atmosphere and
general exaltation acted upon their over-wrought imaginations. Thus,
at my right was the depressing, silent image of death; at my left the
decorous bacchanalia of life; on the one side nature, cold and gloomy,
and in mourning garb; on the other side, man on pleasure bent. And,
standing on the borderland of those two incongruous pictures, which
repeated thousands of times in diverse ways, make Paris the most
entertaining and most philosophical city in the world, I played a
mental /macedoine/[*], half jesting, half funereal. With my left foot
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