| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away.
The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not
so fearful.
His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor
and lay there sputtering. He placed his foot on it and put it out.
Then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by
the table and buried his face in his hands.
"Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!"
There was no answer, but he could hear the young man
sobbing at the window. "Pray, Dorian, pray," he murmured.
"What is it that one was taught to say in one's boyhood?
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
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 Moran of the Lady Letty by Frank Norris: the very finger-nails, were gray with grime; the jeans and blouse
and boots were fouled with grease, with oil, with pitch, and all
manner of the dirt of an uncared-for ship. And as the dancers of
the cotillon pressed about, and a hundred kid-gloved hands
stretched toward his own palms, there fell from Wilbur's belt upon
the waxed floor of the ballroom the knife he had so grimly used in
the fight upon the beach, the ugly stains still blackening on the
haft.
There was no more cotillon that night. They put him down at last;
and in half a dozen sentences Wilbur told them of how he had been
shanghaied--told them of Magdalena Bay, his fortune in the
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