| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: And live we how we can, yet die we must.
[Enter OXFORD and SOMERSET.]
SOMERSET.
Ah, Warwick, Warwick! wert thou as we are,
We might recover all our loss again.
The queen from France hath brought a puissant power;
Even now we heard the news. Ah, couldst thou fly!
WARWICK.
Why, then I would not fly.--Ah, Montague!
If thou be there, sweet brother, take my hand
And with thy lips keep in my soul awhile.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas: to convince myself that I had not been dreaming.
My body, succumbing to the moral shock, was incapable of
movement. Anxiety, the night walk, and the morning's news had
prostrated me. My father profited by this total prostration of
all my faculties to demand of me a formal promise to accompany
him. I promised all that he asked, for I was incapable of
sustaining a discussion, and I needed some affection to help me
to live, after what had happened. I was too thankful that my
father was willing to console me under such a calamity.
All that I remember is that on that day, about five o'clock, he
took me with him in a post-chaise. Without a word to me, he had
Camille |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: distance, where Friday was to take them.
When I showed myself to the two hostages, it was with the captain,
who told them I was the person the governor had ordered to look
after them; and that it was the governor's pleasure they should not
stir anywhere but by my direction; that if they did, they would be
fetched into the castle, and be laid in irons: so that as we never
suffered them to see me as governor, I now appeared as another
person, and spoke of the governor, the garrison, the castle, and
the like, upon all occasions.
The captain now had no difficulty before him, but to furnish his
two boats, stop the breach of one, and man them. He made his
Robinson Crusoe |
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 Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: In such a situation she naturally made many a romance such as young
girls are fond of weaving. She clasped the idea--perhaps with the
natural ardor of a noble and virgin imagination--of ennobling one of
those men, and of raising him to the height where her own dreams led
her. She may have made a Paul of some young man who caught her eye,
merely to fasten her wild ideas on an actual being, as the mists of a
damp atmosphere, touched by frost, crystallize on the branches of a
tree by the wayside. She must have flung herself deep into the abysses
of her dream, for though she often returned bearing on her brow, as if
from vast heights, some luminous reflections, oftener she seemed to
carry in her hand the flowers that grew beside a torrent she had
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