| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: one of the minor offenses against the law. His term
would probably have been shorter, but the judge
had been careless, and he had no friends. Stebbins
had never been the sort to make many friends,
although he had never cherished animosity toward
any human being. Even some injustice in his sen-
tence had not caused him to feel any rancor.
During his stay in the prison he had not been
really unhappy. He had accepted the inevitable --
the yoke of the strong for the weak -- with a patience
which brought almost a sense of enjoyment. But,
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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 Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at his coming.
Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when Old
Wateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village
and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborne's
general store. There seemed to be a change in the old man - an
added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly
transformed him from an object to a subject of fear - though he
was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst
it all he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his
daughter, and what he said of the child's paternity was remembered
by many of his hearers years afterward.
The Dunwich Horror |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: "`Yes,' said he, `I also am an Arcadian! This false dual existence
which I have been leading will soon be merged in the unity of
Nature. Our lives must conform to her sacred law. Why can't we
strip off these hollow Shams,' (he made great use of that word,)
`and be our true selves, pure, perfect, and divine?'
"Miss Ringtop heaved a sigh, and repeated a stanza from her
favorite poet:
"`Ah, when wrecked are my desires
On the everlasting Never,
And my heart with all its fires
Out forever,
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: untouched, however completely its common existence might be
extinguished.
This Constitution, so ingeniously made invulnerable, was, however, like
Achilles, vulnerable at one point: not in its heel, but in its head, or
rather, in the two heads into which it ran out-the Legislative Assembly,
on the one hand, and the President on the other. Run through the
Constitution and it will be found that only those paragraphs wherein the
relation of the President to the Legislative Assembly is defined, are
absolute, positive, uncontradictory, undistortable.
Here the bourgeois republicans were concerned in securing their own
position. Articles 45-70 of the Constitution are so framed that the
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