| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: after a day's extinction; discoloured with the soils of many a
stale debauch, and reeking yet with pot-house odours. In lieu of
buckles at his knees, he wore unequal loops of packthread; and in
his grimy hands he held a knotted stick, the knob of which was
carved into a rough likeness of his own vile face. Such was the
visitor who doffed his three-cornered hat in Gashford's presence,
and waited, leering, for his notice.
'Ah! Dennis!' cried the secretary. 'Sit down.'
'I see my lord down yonder--' cried the man, with a jerk of his
thumb towards the quarter that he spoke of, 'and he says to me,
says my lord, "If you've nothing to do, Dennis, go up to my house
Barnaby Rudge |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: Gunther's boat is seen approaching, when Hagen seizes a cowhorn
and calls the tribesmen to welcome their chief and his bride. It
is most exhilarating, this colloquy with the startled and hastily
armed clan, ending with a thundering chorus, the drums marking
the time with mighty pulses from dominant to tonic, much as
Rossini would have made them do if he had been a pupil of
Beethoven's.
A terrible scene follows. Gunther leads his captive bride
straight into the presence of Siegfried, whom she claims as her
husband by the ring, which she is astomshed to see on his finger:
Gunther, as she supposes, having torn it from her the night
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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 Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: administered to a man of letters in a position inferior to his own,
a man of letters moreover in the very act of praising him. To make
the thing right he talked to me exactly as an equal and on the
ground of what we both loved best. The hour, the place, the
unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn't have done
anything more intensely effective.
CHAPTER III.
"I DON'T quite know how to explain it to you," he said, "but it was
the very fact that your notice of my book had a spice of
intelligence, it was just your exceptional sharpness, that produced
the feeling - a very old story with me, I beg you to believe -
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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 The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: was no longer worthy. He had left his work for a woman.
It is true that he had expected to go back at once. But the Philadelphia,
which had been listed to sail the next day, was held up by a strike in
Liverpool, and he waited on, taking such hours as she could give him,
feverishly anxious to make her happy, buying her little gifts mostly
flowers, which she wore tucked in her belt and smiled over, because she
had never before received flowers from a man.
He was alternately gay and silent. They walked across the Thames by the
Parliament buildings, and midway across he stopped and looked long at the
stream. And they went to the Zoological Gardens, where he gravely named
one of the sea lions for Colonel Lilias because of its mustache, and
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