| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: No, you don't, you couldn't with eyebrows like yours."
He seemed pleased, and laughed as he said, "So! You are a physiognomist.
I learn more here with each hour. I am with so much pleasure coming
to you to breakfast, and, oh, sir, you will pardon praise from an old man,
but you are blessed in your wife."
I would listen to him go on praising Mina for a day, so I simply
nodded and stood silent.
"She is one of God's women, fashioned by His own hand
to show us men and other women that there is a heaven
where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth.
So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an egoist, and that,
Dracula |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: affectation of mystery while he approaches the fearful and
wonderful part. It was with such advantages that the present
writer heard the following events related, more than twenty years
since, by the celebrated Miss Seward of Litchfield, who, to her
numerous accomplishments, added, in a remarkable degree, the
power of narrative in private conversation. In its present form
the tale must necessarily lose all the interest which was
attached to it by the flexible voice and intelligent features of
the gifted narrator. Yet still, read aloud to an undoubting
audience by the doubtful light of the closing evening, or in
silence by a decaying taper, and amidst the solitude of a half-
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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 Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: cut the riems from the waist and neck: the riems dropped to the ground
from the arms, and the man stood free. Like a dazed dumb creature, he
stood, with his head still down, eyeing Peter.
Instantly Peter slipped the red bundle from his arm into the man's passive
hand.
"Ari-tsemaia! Hamba! Loop! Go!" whispered Peter Halket; using a word
from each African language he knew. But the black man still stood
motionless, looking at him as one paralysed.
"Hamba! Sucka! Go!" he whispered, motioning his hand.
In an instant a gleam of intelligence shot across the face; then a wild
transport. Without a word, without a sound, as the tiger leaps when the
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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 Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: surroundings, while in London. She actually prowled, alone,
at night, in the evil-smelling, narrow streets of the poorer
quarter of Paris, and how she escaped unharmed is a mystery
that never bothered her, because she had never known fear of
streets. She had always walked on the streets of Winnebago,
Wisconsin, alone. It never occurred to her not to do the
same in the streets of Chicago, or New York, or London, or
Paris. She found Berlin, with its Adlon, its appalling
cleanliness, its overfed populace, and its omnipresent
Kaiser forever scudding up and down Unter den Linden in his
chocolate-colored car, incredibly dull, and unpicturesque.
Fanny Herself |
