| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: were always changing machinists, and this new fellow didn't even
bother to ask if the car belonged to me. It was a very easy-
going place. . .
"Well, I jumped in, ran up Broadway, and let the car go as soon
as I was out of Harlem. Dark as it was, I could trust myself to
strike a sharp pace. In the shadow of a wood I stopped a second
and got into the beard and ulster. Then away again--it was just
eleven-thirty when I got to Wrenfield.
"I left the car in a dark lane behind the Lenman place, and
slipped through the kitchen-garden. The melon-houses winked at
me through the dark--I remember thinking that they knew what I
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Desert Gold by Zane Grey: "It's only that I'm afraid. Oh, Dick, he'd shoot you in the back."
"No, Nell, a man of his kind wouldn't have nerve enough even for that."
"You'll go?" she cried wildly.
Gale smiled, and the smile made Belding cold.
"Dick, I cannot keep you back?"
"No," he said.
Then the woman in her burst through instinctive fear, and with
her eyes blazing black in her white face she lifted parted quivering
lips and kissed him.
Gale left the patio, and Belding followed closely at his heels.
They went through the sitting-room. Outside upon the porch sat
Desert Gold |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: Madeleine, a gazelle with mournful eyes, walked with her mother.
Monsieur de Mortsauf came to me with open arms, pressed me to him and
kissed me on both cheeks crying out, "Felix, I know now that I owed
you my life."
Madame de Mortsauf stood with her back towards me during this little
scene, under pretext of showing the horse to Madeleine.
"Ha, the devil! that's what women are," cried the count; "admiring
your horse!"
Madeleine turned, came up to me, and I kissed her hand, looking at the
countess, who colored.
"Madeleine seems much better," I said.
The Lily of the Valley |
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 Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: of the savage. For I had been up and down the corridors of those
Greek sculptures, which remain as a perpetual sermon to rich and
poor, amid our artificial, unwholesome, and it may be decaying
pseudo-civilisation, saying with looks more expressive than all
words--Such men and women can be; for such they have been; and
such you may be yet, if you will use that science of which you too
often only boast. Above all, I had been pondering over the awful
and yet tender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and
its kindred temples. And these, or such as these, I thought to
myself, were the sisters of the men who fought at Marathon and
Salamis; the mothers of many a man among the ten thousand whom
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