| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: 'That it must deal with some phase of native life.'
Miss Harris walked to a point behind us, and stood there with her
eyes fixed upon the picture. I glanced at her once; her gaze was
steady, but perfectly blank. Then she joined us again, and struck
into the stream of my volubility.
'I am delighted,' she said, pleasantly, to Armour. 'You have done
exactly what I wanted you to do. You have won the Viceroy's medal,
and all the reputation there is to win in this place. Come and dine
tonight, and we will rejoice together. But wasn't it--for you--a
little difficult?'
He looked at her as if she had offered him a cup, and then dashed it
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: semblance of a creek in which the _Dobryna_ could find an anchorage.
There was no outlying ridge on which a footing could be gained.
The precipice was perpendicular as a wall, its topmost height crowned
with the same conglomerate of crystallized lamellae that had all along
been so pronounced a feature.
With her steam at high pressure, the yacht made rapid progress towards
the east. The weather remained perfectly fine, the temperature
became gradually cooler, so that there was little prospect of vapors
accumulating in the atmosphere; and nothing more than a few cirri,
almost transparent, veiled here and there the clear azure of the sky.
Throughout the day the pale rays of the sun, apparently lessened
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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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she
woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the
floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination,
hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed
vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she
had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it
silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and
the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which
curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in
her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and
she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
To the Lighthouse |
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 From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: large when joined together, and yet larger when they receive a
third river (viz., the Naddir), which joins them near Clarendon
Park, about three miles below the city; then, with a deep channel
and a current less rapid, they run down to Christchurch, which is
their port. And where they empty themselves into the sea, from
that town upwards towards Salisbury they are made navigable to
within two miles, and might be so quite into the city, were it not
for the strength of the stream.
As the city of Winchester is a city without trade--that is to say,
without any particular manufactures--so this city of Salisbury and
all the county of Wilts, of which it is the capital, are full of a
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