| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Just Folks by Edgar A. Guest: And the children come home at the end of the day
To tell what the little old man had to say.
Once the little old man didn't trudge to the store,
And the tap of his cane wasn't heard any more;
The children looked eagerly for him each day
And wondered why he didn't come out to play
Till some of them saw Doctor Brown ring his bell,
And they wept when they heard that he might not get well.
But after awhile he got out with his cane,
And called all the children around him again;
And I think as I see him go trudging along
Just Folks |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: two cases are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly
little when we consider that in the one case it is his own classics
the student is reading, in the other the Chinaman's.
If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over
he is set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any
trade but his father's would strike the family as simply preposterous.
Why should he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what
other business should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not
already there, a part of the existing order of things; and is he not
the son of his father and heir therefore of the paternal skill?
Not that such inherited aptness is recognized scientifically; it is
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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 The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: If that's your name for them -- with only ghosts
For company? You know that when a woman
Is blessed, or cursed, with a divine impatience
(Another name of yours for a bad temper)
She must have one at hand on whom to wreak it
(That's what you mean, whatever the turn you give it),
Sure of a kindred sympathy, and thereby
Effect a mutual calm? You know that wisdom,
Given in vain to make a food for those
Who are without it, will be seen at last,
And even at last only by those who gave it,
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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 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: denial. Fashionable women kept their bodies bright like delicate
porcelain, by external attention. There was nothing inside the
porcelain; but she was not even as bright as that. The mental life!
Suddenly she hated it with a rushing fury, the swindle!
She looked in the other mirror's reflection at her back, her waist, her
loins. She was getting thinner, but to her it was not becoming. The
crumple of her waist at the back, as she bent back to look, was a
little weary; and it used to be so gay-looking. And the longish slope
of her haunches and her buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of
richness. Gone! Only the German boy had loved it, and he was ten years
dead, very nearly. How time went by! Ten years dead, and she was only
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
