| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: assumed the color of a criminal passion. I despised myself for bowing
to Taillefer when, by chance, he accompanied his daughter, but I bowed
to him all the same.
Alas! for my misfortune Victorine is not only a pretty girl, she is
also educated, intelligent, full of talent and of charm, without the
slightest pedantry or the faintest tinge of assumption. She converses
with reserve, and her nature has a melancholy grace which no one can
resist. She loves me, or at least she lets me think so; she has a
certain smile which she keeps for me alone; for me, her voice grows
softer still. Oh, yes! she loves me! But she adores her father; she
tells me of his kindness, his gentleness, his excellent qualities.
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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 Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: whether, if left to herself, she would ever have asked
any one to the house; but he had long given up trying
to disengage her real self from the shape into which
tradition and training had moulded her. It was
expected that well-off young couples in New York should
do a good deal of informal entertaining, and a Welland
married to an Archer was doubly pledged to the
tradition.
But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two
borrowed footmen, with Roman punch, roses from
Henderson's, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different
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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 Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: with this I brushed the fish out of the pool. I sold them to a
teamster for ten cents. With this I bought shoe blacking and a
shoe brush and spent my Saturdays blacking boots for travelers at
the depot and the hotel. I had established a boot-blacking
business which I pushed in my spare time for several years. My
brush and blacking represented my capital. The shining of the
travelers' shoes was labor. I was a capitalist but not an
employer; I was a laborer but not an employee.
"Labor is prior to and independent of capital," said Lincoln.
This is true. I labored to break the branches from the tree
before I had any capital. They brought me fish, which were
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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 Before Adam by Jack London: down with Big-Tooth and dreamed his dreams.
This is getting almost beyond the grip of the
intellect, I know; but I do know that I have done this
thing. And let me tell you that the flying and
crawling dreams of Big-Tooth were as vivid to him as
the falling-through-space dream is to you.
For Big-Tooth also had an other-self, and when he slept
that other-self dreamed back into the past, back to the
winged reptiles and the clash and the onset of dragons,
and beyond that to the scurrying, rodent-like life of
the tiny mammals, and far remoter still, to the
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