| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: "THEY HAD NO POET . . ."
"Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride!
They had no poet and they died."--POPE.
By Tigris, or the streams of Ind,
Ere Colchis rose, or Babylon,
Forgotten empires dreamed and sinned,
Setting tall towns against the dawn,
Which, when the proud Sun smote upon,
Flashed fire for fire and pride for pride;
Their names were . . . Ask oblivion! . . .
"They had no poet, and they died."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: "Guess so," he said. "You needn't fool with it. There's nothing
else but a lead-pencil and a kind of worked-out knife."
I looked in the bag, however, and was well rewarded.
"Every man to his trade, captain," said I. "You're a sailor, and
you've given me plenty of points; but I am an artist, and allow
me to inform you this is quite as strange as all the rest. The
knife is a palette-knife; the pencil a Winsor and Newton, and a
B B B at that. A palette-knife and a B B B on a tramp brig! It's
against the laws of nature."
"It would sicken a dog, wouldn't it?" said Nares.
"Yes," I continued, "it's been used by an artist, too: see how it's
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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 This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: delicious half-hour of adoration. But he fell gradually in love
and began to speculate wildly on marriage. Though this design
flowed through his brain even to his lips, still he knew
afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he
dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in
his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone
out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her
changeling tongue. But she was the first fine woman he ever knew
and one of the few good people who ever interested him. She made
her goodness such an asset. Amory had decided that most good
people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else
This Side of Paradise |
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 Turn of the Screw by Henry James: he had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken
his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces,
up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him,
along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to
his forsaken room.
Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--
oh, HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his
little mind for something plausible and not too grotesque.
It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time,
over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph.
It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't play any
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