| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: Something better! I little knew what he was offering.
The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I
will own I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife
and child in the act of mounting into the other. This was my first
experience of the sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly
and extraneous, I pray God it be my last as well. I kept my eyes
to myself, and know nothing of the woman except that she had
beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed by my appearance.
As a matter of fact, the situation was more trying to me than to
the pair. A pair keep each other in countenance; it is the single
gentleman who has to blush. But I could not help attributing my
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: the actors. This ideal Shakespear was too well behaved to get drunk;
therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout
with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the remorse of Cassio
treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of
Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish
Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the
greatest of teetotallers.
Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then
rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous
result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all
(with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving
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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 In the Cage by Henry James: away--the fleeting absolute ruled the scene. The plans, hour by
hour, were simply superseded, and it was much of a rest to the
girl, as she sat on the pier and overlooked the sea and the
company, to see them evaporate in rosy fumes and to feel that from
moment to moment there was less left to cipher about. The week
proves blissfully fine, and her mother, at their lodgings--partly
to her embarrassment and partly to her relief--struck up with the
landlady an alliance that left the younger couple a great deal of
freedom. This relative took her pleasure of a week at Bournemouth
in a stuffy back-kitchen and endless talks; to that degree even
that Mr. Mudge himself--habitually inclined indeed to a scrutiny of
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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 The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: reached even to the belt of the averted Ancient, upon which,
lightly grazing, it fell to the ground. Temple neither felt the
weapon touch him nor heard it fall: and Wotton might have escaped
to his army, with the honour of having remitted his lance against
so great a leader unrevenged; but Apollo, enraged that a javelin
flung by the assistance of so foul a goddess should pollute his
fountain, put on the shape of -, and softly came to young Boyle,
who then accompanied Temple: he pointed first to the lance, then
to the distant Modern that flung it, and commanded the young hero
to take immediate revenge. Boyle, clad in a suit of armour which
had been given him by all the gods, immediately advanced against
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