| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: invested with a new importance. He had scarcely before
in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle
which included ladies--certainly never in the presence
of such certificated and hall-marked ladies as these.
His future, however, was to be filled with experiences
of this nature. Already, after this briefest of ventures
into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of the great
subject springing up in his thoughts. In this matter
of women sticking together, for example--here before his
eyes was one of the prettiest instances of it imaginable.
As he looked again at the two figures on the sofa,
The Market-Place |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: any diseased bodies were removed, or dead bodies buried, or infected
clothes burnt, it was done in the night; and all the bodies which were
thrown into the great pits in the several churchyards or burying-
grounds, as has. been observed, were so removed in the night, and
everything was covered and closed before day. So that in the daytime
there was not the least signal of the calamity to be seen or heard of,
except what was to be observed from the emptiness of the streets, and
sometimes from the passionate outcries and lamentations of the
people, out at their windows, and from the numbers of houses and
shops shut up.
Nor was the silence and emptiness of the streets so much in the city
A Journal of the Plague Year |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom
Valley, it was always green. Yet is was in that vale
that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love
it as formerly. Beauty to her, as to all who have
felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing
symbolized.
Keeping the Vale on her right she steered steadily
westward; passing above the Hintocks, crossing at
right-angles the high-road from Sherton-Abbas to
Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy,
with the dell between them called "The Devil's
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
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 Witch, et. al by Anton Chekhov: "I've said so to the women; they won't heed me. . . .They don't
trouble about it, the silly things!"
Silence followed. . . . Meanwhile the darkness was growing
thicker and thicker, and objects began to lose their contours.
The streak behind the hill had completely died away, and the
stars were growing brighter and more luminous. . . . The
mournfully monotonous chirping of the grasshoppers, the call of
the landrail, and the cry of the quail did not destroy the
stillness of the night, but, on the contrary, gave it an added
monotony. It seemed as though the soft sounds that enchanted the
ear came, not from birds or insects, but from the stars looking
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