| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: him was the bird-faced man whose cabin had once been taken from
him and given to Bert.
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With that apparition began a new phase of GoatIsland in Bert's
experience. He ceased to be a solitary representative of
humanity in a vast and violent and incomprehensible universe, and
became once more a social creature, a man in a world of other
men. For an instant these two were terrible, then they seemed
sweet and desirable as brothers. They too were in this scrape
with him, marooned and puzzled. He wanted extremely to hear
exactly what had happened to them. What mattered it if one was a
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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 Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: Bestir themselves to warm their feathers cold;
Then some of them fly off without return,
Others come back to where they started from,
And others, wheeling round, still keep at home;
Such fashion it appeared to me was there
Within the sparkling that together came,
As soon as on a certain step it struck,
And that which nearest unto us remained
Became so clear, that in my thought I said,
"Well I perceive the love thou showest me;
But she, from whom I wait the how and when
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: Rowley, grinning from ear to ear, closed the door behind us; the
two impudent rascals of post-boys cheered and laughed aloud as we
drove off; and my own postillion urged his horses at once into a
rattling trot. It was plain I was supposed by all to have done a
very dashing act, and ravished the bride from the ravisher.
In the meantime I stole a look at the little lady. She was in a
state of pitiable discomposure, and her arms shook on her lap in
her black lace mittens.
'Madam - ' I began.
And she, in the same moment, finding her voice: 'O, what you must
think of me!'
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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 The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: smile. Lincoln's mind was unusually sound and sane and normal. He
had a cheerful, wholesome, sunny nature, yet he had inherited the
strongest traits of the pioneers, and there was in him, moreover,
much of the poet, with a poet's great capacity for joy and pain.
It is not strange that as he developed into manhood, especially
when his deeper nature began to feel the stirrings of ambition
and of love, these seasons of depression and gloom came upon him
with overwhelming force.
During his childhood he had known few women, save his mother, and
that kind, God-fearing woman his stepmother, who did so much to
make his childhood hopeful and happy. No man ever honored women
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