| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: contained words that lifted her heart. Her starved love greedily absorbed
them. In them she had excuse for any resolve that might bring Glenn closer
to her. And she pondered over this longing to go to him.
Carley had the means to come and go and live as she liked. She did not
remember her father, who had died when she was a child. Her mother had left
her in the care of a sister, and before the war they had divided their time
between New York and Europe, the Adirondacks and Florida, Carley had gone
in for Red Cross and relief work with more of sincerity than most of her
set. But she was really not used to making any decision as definite and
important as that of going out West alone. She had never been farther west
than Jersey City; and her conception of the West was a hazy one of vast
The Call of the Canyon |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: to savings banks is a piece of crass political folly. Suppose that
things take a doubtful turn and people lose confidence, the Government
will find that they have instituted a queue for money, like the queues
outside the bakers' shops. So many savings banks, so many riots. Three
street boys hoist a flag in some corner or other, and you have a
revolution ready made.
"But this danger, however great it may be, seems to me less to be
dreaded than the widespread demoralization. Savings banks are a means
of inoculating the people, the classes least restrained by education
or by reason from schemes that are tacitly criminal, with the vices
bred of self-interest. See what comes of philanthropy!
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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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: he got out of the house, he stumbled upon the threshold with
such violence, that he broke the nail of his great toe,
insomuch that blood gushed out of his shoe. He was not gone
very far before he saw two ravens fighting on the top of a
house which stood on his left hand as he passed along; and
though he was surrounded with a number of people, a stone,
struck from its place by one of the ravens, fell just at his
foot. This even the boldest men about him felt as a check.
But Blossius of Cuma, who was present, told him, that it
would be a shame, and an ignominious thing, for Tiberius, who
was the son of Gracchus, the grandson of Scipio Africanus,
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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 I Have A Dream by Martin Luther King, Jr.: that this speech had never been copyrighted, since at that time
it was required to post a copyright notice on printed copies to
be distributed, and this speech was distributed without such an
extra (C) Copyright notice as was then required in the US. The
US revised this law in 1989, an no longer requires such notice.
#STARTMARK#
I have a Dream
by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington
D.C. on August 28, 1963
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow
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