| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: admirers of poetry, and began to try their hands in little pieces.
Many pleasant walks we four had together on Sundays into the woods,
near Schuylkill, where we read to one another, and conferr'd on what
we read.
Ralph was inclin'd to pursue the study of poetry, not doubting
but he might become eminent in it, and make his fortune by it,
alleging that the best poets must, when they first began to write,
make as many faults as he did. Osborne dissuaded him, assur'd him
he had no genius for poetry, and advis'd him to think of nothing
beyond the business he was bred to; that, in the mercantile way,
tho' he had no stock, he might, by his diligence and punctuality,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: felt in the remotest depths of his native woods; so he turned
away and sat down again before the door. There were graves around
the church, and now an uneasy thought obtruded into Robin's
breast. What if the object of his search, which had been so often
and so strangely thwarted, were all the time mouldering in his
shroud? What if his kinsman should glide through yonder gate, and
nod and smile to him in dimly passing by?
"Oh that any breathing thing were here with me!" said Robin.
Recalling his thoughts from this uncomfortable track, he sent
them over forest, hill, and stream, and attempted to imagine how
that evening of ambiguity and weariness had been spent by his
The Snow Image |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Adam Bede by George Eliot: takes his place in upheaving a weight of timber, saying, "Let
alone, lad! Thee'st got too much gristle i' thy bones yet"; or as
he fixes his keen black eyes on the motions of a workman on the
other side of the room and warns him that his distances are not
right. Look at this broad-shouldered man with the bare muscular
arms, and the thick, firm, black hair tossed about like trodden
meadow-grass whenever he takes off his paper cap, and with the
strong barytone voice bursting every now and then into loud and
solemn psalm-tunes, as if seeking an outlet for superfluous
strength, yet presently checking himself, apparently crossed by
some thought which jars with the singing. Perhaps, if you had not
Adam Bede |
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 In the Cage by Henry James: portentous: this in reference to places of which the names--
Eastbourne, Folkestone, Cromer, Scarborough, Whitby--tormented her
with something of the sound of the plash of water that haunts the
traveller in the desert. She had not been out of London for a
dozen years, and the only thing to give a taste to the present dead
weeks was the spice of a chronic resentment. The sparse customers,
the people she did see, were the people who were "just off"--off on
the decks of fluttered yachts, off to the uttermost point of rocky
headlands where the very breeze was then playing for the want of
which she said to herself that she sickened.
There was accordingly a sense in which, at such a period, the great
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