| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: Poem: Magdalen Walks
The little white clouds are racing over the sky,
And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,
The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch
Sways and swings as the thrush goes hurrying by.
A delicate odour is borne on the wings of the morning breeze,
The odour of deep wet grass, and of brown new-furrowed earth,
The birds are singing for joy of the Spring's glad birth,
Hopping from branch to branch on the rocking trees.
And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,
And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: much bent, he nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time,
his elbows and his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as
almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether,
from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the
hotel, but the predominant notes. The discomfort was in a manner
contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded;
the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it--or unless
Waymarsh himself should--it would constitute a menace for his own
prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the
agreeable. On their first going up together to the room Strether
had selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and
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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 Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: this house to which infirmities confined her enabled her to perceive
certain natural effects that are imperceptible to the senses of
others, but which persons under the influence of excessive feeling are
keen to discover, or whether Nature, in compensation for her physical
defects, had given her more delicate sensations than better organized
beings,--it is certain that this woman had heard the steps of a man in
a gallery built above the kitchens and the servants' hall, by which
the front house communicated with the "back-quarter." The steps grew
more distinct. Soon, without possessing the power of this ardent
creature to abolish space and meet her other self, even a stranger
would have heard the foot-fall of a man upon the staircase which led
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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 Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: his carol and drops headlong among the corn, as a broad-winged
buzzard swings from some wooded peak into the abyss of the valley,
and hangs high-poised above the heavenward songster. The air is
full of perfume; sweet clover, new-mown hay, the fragrant breath of
kine, the dainty scent of sea-weed wreaths and fresh wet sand.
Glorious day, glorious place, "bridal of earth and sky," decked
well with bridal garlands, bridal perfumes, bridal songs,--What do
those four cloaked figures there by the river brink, a dark spot on
the fair face of the summer morn?
Yet one is as cheerful as if he too, like all nature round him,
were going to a wedding; and that is Will Cary. He has been
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