| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: you're giving us."
The man in the sailor suit fell back a pace or two and
surveyed his work with a critical but satisfied eye.
"Pitchers," he said, "don't do it justice. We've opened a
recruiting office here. Looking for young men with brains, and
muscle, and ambition. It's a great chance. We don't get to these
here little towns much."
He placed a handbill in Eddie's hand. Eddie glanced down at
it sheepishly.
"I've heard," he said, "that it's a hard life."
The man in the sailor suit threw back his head and laughed,
Buttered Side Down |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: consumption, and was buried the day you first came.'
'Let us go away. I don't like standing by HIM, even if you never
loved him. He was BEFORE me.'
'Worries make you unreasonable,' she half pouted, following
Stephen at the distance of a few steps. 'Perhaps I ought to have
told you before we sat down. Yes; let us go.'
Chapter IX
'Her father did fume'
Oppressed, in spite of themselves, by a foresight of impending
complications, Elfride and Stephen returned down the hill hand in
hand. At the door they paused wistfully, like children late at
A Pair of Blue Eyes |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: seductive surroundings, and the appeal of the defenseless for
protection, might have been resisted by a more civilized
man, but my civilization is not even skin deep--it does not go
deeper than my clothes.
"Paris is no place for me. I will but continue to stumble
into more and more serious pitfalls. The man-made
restrictions are irksome. I feel always that I am a prisoner.
I cannot endure it, my friend, and so I think that I shall go
back to my own jungle, and lead the life that God intended
that I should lead when He put me there."
"Do not take it so to heart, Jean," responded D'Arnot.
The Return 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 Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: in a speaker. The fact is, that during the course of his lectures at
the Johannĉum, the Professor often came to a complete standstill; he
fought with wilful words that refused to pass his struggling lips,
such words as resist and distend the cheeks, and at last break out
into the unasked-for shape of a round and most unscientific oath:
then his fury would gradually abate.
Now in mineralogy there are many half-Greek and half-Latin terms,
very hard to articulate, and which would be most trying to a poet's
measures. I don't wish to say a word against so respectable a
science, far be that from me. True, in the august presence of
rhombohedral crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, Fassaites,
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
