| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Collection of Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter: currant wine! It's very bad
to wash!" said Mrs. Tiggy-
winkle.
MRS. TIGGY-WINKLE'S
nose went sniffle, sniffle,
snuffle, and her eyes went
twinkle, twinkle; and she
fetched another hot iron from
the fire.
THERE'S one of my
pocket-handkins!" cried
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: in gentle slumber.
But would this good weather last? Babcock rose hurriedly, as this
anxiety again took possession of him, and leaned over the
deck-rail, scanning the sky. He did not like the drift of the low
clouds off to the west; southeasters began that way. It looked as
though the wind might change.
Some men would not have worried over these possibilities. Babcock
did. He was that kind of man.
When the boat touched the shore, he sprang over the chains, and
hurried through the ferry-slip.
"Keep an eye out, sir," the bridge-tender called after him,--he
|
| 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: liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois
competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois
legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to
the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose,
by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick
of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was,
presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its
corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political
constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment
was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons,
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 Touchstone by Edith Wharton: to take from even her most intimate speech the perfect bloom of
privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come
near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in
the intervals of its expression. Later, when to be loved by her
had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical
reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an
agony of conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old
papers, his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him with
inarticulate misery. . . .
"She had so few intimate friends . . . that letters will be of
|
