| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: triumphs, he distributed rewards to his soldiers, and treated
the people with feasting and shows. He entertained the whole
people together at one feast, where twenty-two thousand dining
couches were laid out; and he made a display of gladiators, and
of battles by sea, in honor, as he said, of his daughter Julia,
though she had been long since dead. When these shows were
over, an account was taken of the people, who from three hundred
and twenty thousand, were now reduced to one hundred and fifty
thousand. So great a waste had the civil war made in Rome
alone, not to mention what the other parts of Italy and the
provinces suffered.
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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 Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: him alive; but this Machiavellian piece of foresight was scarcely
necessary. His son, young Felipe Belvidero, grew up as a Spaniard
as religiously conscientious as his father was irreligious, in
virtue, perhaps, of the old rule, "A miser has a spendthrift
son." The Abbot of San-Lucar was chosen by Don Juan to be the
director of the consciences of the Duchess of Belvidero and her
son Felipe. The ecclesiastic was a holy man, well shaped, and
admirably well proportioned. He had fine dark eyes, a head like
that of Tiberius, worn with fasting, bleached by an ascetic life,
and, like all dwellers in the wilderness, was daily tempted. The
noble lord had hopes, it may be, of despatching yet another monk
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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 Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: bunches of little frame shops. Swinging signs creaked in the wind the
street's whole length. The candy-striped pole, which indicates nobility
proud and ancient along the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated
merely the humble barbershop along the main street of Dawson's Landing.
On a chief corner stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to
bottom with tin pots and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's noisy
notice to the world (when the wind blew) that his shop was on hand
for business at that corner.
The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river;
its body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline;
its most rearward border fringed itself out and scattered its houses
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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 Anabasis by Xenophon: pupil of Socrates. He marched with the Spartans,
and was exiled from Athens. Sparta gave him land
and property in Scillus, where he lived for many
years before having to move once more, to settle
in Corinth. He died in 354 B.C.
The Anabasis is his story of the march to Persia
to aid Cyrus, who enlisted Greek help to try and
take the throne from Artaxerxes, and the ensuing
return of the Greeks, in which Xenophon played a
leading role. This occurred between 401 B.C. and
March 399 B.C.
Anabasis |
