| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: transfigured with the fire and earnestuess of his thought, and
his voice took on a high clear tenor tone that carried his words
and ideas far out over the listening crowds. At such moments,
when answering Douglas in the heat of their joint-debate, or
later, during the years of war, when he pronounced with noble
gravity the words of his famous addresses, not one in the throngs
that heard him could say with truth that he was other than a
handsome man.
It has been the fashion, too, to say that he was slovenly, and
careless in his dress. This also is a mistake. His clothes could
not fit smoothly on his gaunt and bony frame. He was no tailor's
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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 Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: and have come back. Here, of course, they have nothing now;
everything belongs to other people. They have settled three or
four families in a hut, so that there are no less than fifteen
persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the young
children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing
to eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence of
hunger, or spotted, typhus; literally every one is stricken. The
doctor's assistant says one goes into a cottage and what does one
see? Every one is sick, every one delirious, some laughing,
others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no one to fetch
them water, no one to give them a drink, and nothing to eat but
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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 The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey: look at her; and then it seemed to him the change in her face
was wonderful.
Later, after he had left Mrs. Bland with a meaning
"Adios--manana," and was walking along beside the old outlaw,
he found himself thinking of the girl instead of the woman, and
of how he had seen her face blaze with hope and gratitude.
CHAPTER VII
That night Duane was not troubled by ghosts haunting his waking
and sleeping hours. He awoke feeling bright and eager, and
grateful to Euchre for having put something worth while into
his mind. During breakfast, however, he was unusually
The Lone Star Ranger |
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 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: their real relations, and they talked about Anna's going to
Vronsky's estate.
In spite of all his social experience Vronsky was, in consequence
of the new position in which he was placed, laboring under a
strange misapprehension. One would have thought he must have
understood that society was closed for him and Anna; but now some
vague ideas had sprung up in his brain that this was only the
case in old-fashioned days, and that now with the rapidity of
modern progress (he had unconsciously become by now a partisan of
every sort of progress) the views of society had changed, and
that the question whether they would be received in society was
Anna Karenina |
