| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: just as good as he was then, and sit down to dinner with just as
good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete, but which my
comparatively few opportunities for observation enable me to
sketch only in the merest outline. It is that of the Collector,
our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military
service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western
territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the
decline of his varied and honourable life.
The Scarlet Letter |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini: shrewdness his calculations upon Mr. Wilding's feelings for his sister,
young Richard had not reckoned. He was not to know that Wilding,
bruised and wounded by Miss Westmacott's scorn of him, had reached
that borderland where love and hate are so merged that they are scarce
to be distinguished. Embittered by the slights she had put upon
him - slights which his sensitive, lover's fancy had magnified a
hundredfold - Anthony Wilding's frame of mind was grown peculiar.
Of his love she would have none; his kindness she seemingly despised.
So be it; she should taste his cruelty. If she scorned his wooing
and forbade him to pursue it, at least it was not hers to deny him
the power to hurt; and in hurting her that would not be loved by him
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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 Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: a few feeble rays upon the figure within.
A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly
from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently
back. For a brief moment I hesitated-- I trembled. Unsheathing my
rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess; but the thought
of an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the solid fabric
of the catacombs, and felt satisfied. I reapproached the wall; I
replied to the yells of him who clamoured. I re-echoed-- I aided--
I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the
clamourer grew still.
It was now midnight, and my task was drawing to a close. I
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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 Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: wanted everything he saw, but abandoned each thing for the last thing.
When he saw the balconies of new houses, when he studied external
ornamentation, he thought all such things, mouldings, carvings, etc.,
out of place in Paris. "Ah!" he would say, "those fine things would
look much better at Provins." When he stood on his doorstep leaning
against the lintel, digesting his morning meal, with a vacant eye, the
mercer was gazing at the house of his fancy gilded by the sun of his
dream; he walked in his garden; he heard the jet from his fountain
falling in pearly drops upon a slab of limestone; he played on his own
billiard-table; he gathered his own flowers.
Sylvie, on the other hand, was thinking so deeply, pen in hand, that
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