| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: me when you landed."
"Came up from Southampton this morning. My brother-in-law
was down there to meet me. We came up to London together."
"Your brother-in-law," observed Thorpe, meditatively.
Some shadowy, remote impression of having forgotten
something troubled his mind for an instant. "Is your
brother-in-law in the rubber business?"
"Extraor'nary thing," explained Tavender, beamingly, "he don't
know no more about the whole affair than the man 'n the moon.
I asked him today--but he couldn't tell me anything about
the business--what it was I'd been sent for, or anything."
The Market-Place |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: rolled for a moment without replying. Then: "I am a man of all work,"
he said. "What you call odd jobs."
"Then you don't do any fighting?"
"In the trenches - no. But now and then I have a little skirmish."
A sort of fear had been formulating itself in Sara Lee's mind. The
trenches she could understand or was beginning to understand. But this
alternately joyous and silent idler, this soldier of no regiment and no
detail - was he playing a man's part in the war?
"Why don't you go into the trenches?" she asked with her usual directness.
"You say there are too few men. Yet - I can understand Monsieur Jean,
because he has only one eye. But you!"
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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 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: felt conscious of having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of
representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of
truth;
not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human
Nature,
of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who
exists
only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously
and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such
mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic
The Communist Manifesto |
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 Sportsman by Xenophon: to those which are inhabited, the population is but thinly scattered
and the folk themselves not addicted to the chase; while in the case
of the sacred islands,[39] the importation of dogs is not allowed. If,
then, we consider what a small proportion of hares existent at the
moment will be hunted down and again the steady increase of the stock
through reproduction, the enormous numbers will not be surprising.[40]
[35] {epiperknoi}. Cf. Pollux, v. 67 foll., "mottled with black."
Blane.
[36] Reading {paraseiron}, perhaps "mottled"; vulg. {paraseron}. Al.
{parasuron}, "ecourtee," Gail.
[37] {upokharopoi}, "subfulvi," Sturz, i.e. "inclined to tawny"; al.
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