| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: home, nodding his head in a manner that would have made any other man
dizzy.
"I wish he would not come back tonight," said Em, her face wet with tears.
"It will be just the same if he comes back tomorrow," said Lyndall.
The two girls sat on the step of the cabin weeping for the German's return.
Lyndall shaded her eyes with her hand from the sunset light.
"There he comes," she said, "whistling 'Ach Jerusalem du schone' so loud I
can hear him from here."
"Perhaps he has found the sheep."
"Found them!" said Lyndall. "He would whistle just so if he knew he had to
die tonight."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: for a long while he was alone with the great woods.
Gradually the spell of pleasure relaxed; his own thoughts returned,
like stinging insects, in a cloud; and the talk of the night before,
like a shower of buffets, fell upon his memory. He looked east and
west for any comforter; and presently he was aware of a cross-road
coming steeply down hill, and a horseman cautiously descending. A
human voice or presence, like a spring in the desert, was now
welcome in itself, and Otto drew bridle to await the coming of this
stranger. He proved to be a very red-faced, thick-lipped
countryman, with a pair of fat saddle-bags and a stone bottle at his
waist; who, as soon as the Prince hailed him, jovially, if somewhat
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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 Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: small unexplored tributary of a large river that empties into the
Atlantic not so far from the equator, lay a small, heavily
palisaded village. Twenty palm-thatched, beehive huts sheltered
its black population, while a half-dozen goat skin tents in the
center of the clearing housed the score of Arabs who found shelter
here while, by trading and raiding, they collected the cargoes which
their ships of the desert bore northward twice each year to the
market of Timbuktu.
Playing before one of the Arab tents was a little girl of ten--a
black-haired, black-eyed little girl who, with her nut-brown skin
and graceful carriage looked every inch a daughter of the desert.
The Son of Tarzan |
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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was
never for a moment safe with Shakespear. Bear in mind that she was
not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as
ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her
complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy
being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes;
that Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding
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