| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: sigh.
"Alas, madame, I have just made a very arduous journey----,
undertaken solely on your account."
"Sir!"
"Oh! it is on behalf of one who calls you Juliette that I am
come," I continued. Her face grew white.
"You will not see him to-day."
"Is he ill?" she asked, and her voice sank lower.
"Yes. But for pity's sake, control yourself. . . . He intrusted
me with secrets that concern you, and you may be sure that never
messenger could be more discreet nor more devoted than I."
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: as a man in the Bible he would hardly have done in real life."
Their voices had instinctively dropped lower, though at first
they had taken no particular care to avoid awakening Clym.
"Well, if that means that your marriage is a misfortune
to you, you know who is to blame," said Wildeve.
"The marriage is no misfortune in itself," she retorted
with some little petulance. "It is simply the accident
which has happened since that has been the cause of my ruin.
I have certainly got thistles for figs in a worldly sense,
but how could I tell what time would bring forth?"
"Sometimes, Eustacia, I think it is a judgment upon you.
Return of the Native |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm: had seen and heard. They were both very unhappy, but agreed to make
the best of things and to remain with one another.
So now the bird set the table, and the mouse looked after the food
and, wishing to prepare it in the same way as the sausage, by rolling
in and out among the vegetables to salt and butter them, she jumped
into the pot; but she stopped short long before she reached the
bottom, having already parted not only with her skin and hair, but
also with life.
Presently the bird came in and wanted to serve up the dinner, but he
could nowhere see the cook. In his alarm and flurry, he threw the wood
here and there about the floor, called and searched, but no cook was
Grimm's Fairy Tales |
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 A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: predestination, value nothing of contagion, let it be in what it will,
could be more obstinate than the people of London; they that were
perfectly sound, and came out of the wholesome air, as we call it, into
the city, made nothing of going into the same houses and chambers,
nay, even into the same beds, with those that had the distemper upon
them, and were not recovered.
Some, indeed, paid for their audacious boldness with the price of
their lives; an infinite number fell sick, and the physicians had more
work than ever, only with this difference, that more of their patients
recovered; that is to say, they generally recovered, but certainly there
were more people infected and fell sick now, when there did not die
A Journal of the Plague Year |
