| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: take an oath to go. But I mean to.'
'There is nothing to be said,' I brought out, feeling indeed that
there was not. 'But I congratulate you, Judy.'
'No, there is nothing to be said. And you congratulate me, no
doubt!'
She stood for a moment quivering in the isolation she made for
herself; and I felt a primitive angry revolt against the delicate
trafficking of souls that could end in such ravage and disaster.
The price was too heavy; I would have denuded her, at the moment, of
all that had led her into this, and turned her out a clod with fine
shoulders like fifty other women in Peshawur. Then, perhaps,
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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 Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: 'Oh, no! mamma will weary all about her before she tires herself
with her exertions; and as for Mr. Oldfield, she has given him to
understand that I have refused his offer, not from any dislike of
his person, but merely because I am giddy and young, and cannot at
present reconcile myself to the thoughts of marriage under any
circumstances: but by next season, she has no doubt, I shall have
more sense, and hopes my girlish fancies will be worn away. So she
has brought me home, to school me into a proper sense of my duty,
against the time comes round again. Indeed, I believe she will not
put herself to the expense of taking me up to London again, unless
I surrender: she cannot afford to take me to town for pleasure and
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: admire, but truly whirled away by my own thoughts. I have always found
this young lady to be a lover of the mysterious; and certainly this
first interview made a mystery that was beyond my plummet. One thing I
learned long after, the hours of the Sunday had been well employed, the
bank porter had been found and examined, my visit to Charles Stewart
was discovered, and the deduction made that I was pretty deep with
James and Alan, and most likely in a continued correspondence with the
last. Hence this broad hint that was given me across the harpsichord.
In the midst of the piece of music, one of the younger misses, who was
at a window over the close, cried on her sisters to come quick, for
there was "GREY EYES again." The whole family trooped there at once,
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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 Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: observed of animals destitute of lungs that they have also but one cavity
in the heart, and that in children who cannot use them while in the womb,
there is a hole through which the blood flows from the hollow vein into
the left cavity of the heart, and a tube through which it passes from the
arterial vein into the grand artery without passing through the lung. In
the next place, how could digestion be carried on in the stomach unless
the heart communicated heat to it through the arteries, and along with
this certain of the more fluid parts of the blood, which assist in the
dissolution of the food that has been taken in? Is not also the operation
which converts the juice of food into blood easily comprehended, when it
is considered that it is distilled by passing and repassing through the
Reason Discourse |
