| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: one man; and these sat in expectant attitudes till a
spent bone was flung to them, and then they went for
it by brigades and divisions, with a rush, and there
ensued a fight which filled the prospect with a tumultu-
ous chaos of plunging heads and bodies and flashing
tails, and the storm of howlings and barkings deafened
all speech for the time; but that was no matter, for
the dog-fight was always a bigger interest anyway; the
men rose, sometimes, to observe it the better and bet
on it, and the ladies and the musicians stretched them-
selves out over their balusters with the same object;
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions
for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different
matter. Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was
tired of supervising him, and had other things to attend to.
And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came daily, and
talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained intact
as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
mountainside. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate;
but Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was
too bald an imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of
the fourth or fifth day of our connection, I explained to
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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 Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: and gay, I should certainly have been saved. Instead of which my love
burst out again with untold violence. Fearing that my scruples might
degenerate into monomania, I resolved to convoke a sanhedrim of sound
consciences, and obtain from them some light on this problem of high
morality and philosophy,--a problem which had been, as we shall see,
still further complicated since my return.
Two days ago, therefore, I collected those of my friends to whom I
attribute most delicacy, probity, and honor. I invited two Englishmen,
the secretary of an embassy, and a puritan; a former minister, now a
mature statesman; a priest, an old man; also my former guardian, a
simple-hearted being who rendered so loyal a guardianship account that
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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 Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: diabolical power enabled him to feel the breath of that voice, to
inhale the fragrant powder with which her hair was covered, to see the
slightest inequalities of her face, to count the blue veins which
threaded their way beneath the satiny skin. And that fresh, brisk
voice of silvery /timbre/, flexible as a thread to which the faintest
breath of air gives form, which it rolls and unrolls, tangles and
blows away, that voice attacked his heart so fiercely that he more
than once uttered an involuntary exclamation, extorted by the
convulsive ecstasy too rarely evoked by human passions. He was soon
obliged to leave the theatre. His trembling legs almost refused to
bear him. He was prostrated, weak, like a nervous man who has given
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