| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: chair. Her eyes were sunken in her head. She had recognized her
at once, but any surprise she may have felt at finding Harmony in
Peter's apartment was sunk in a general apathy, a compound of
nervous reaction and fatigue. During the long hours in the
express she had worn herself out with fright and remorse: there
was nothing left now but exhaustion.
Harmony was bewildered, but obedient. She went back to the cold
kitchen and lighted a fire. She made Marie as comfortable as she
could in the salon, and then went into her room to dress. There
she read the letter again, and wondered if Peter had gone through
life like this, picking up waifs and strays and shouldering their
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: impulse, above all, to move, to act, to charge, somehow and upon
something - to show himself, in a word, that he wasn't afraid. The
state of "holding on" was thus the state to which he was
momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the great
vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having
clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the
nearest chair-back. He had been surprised at any rate - of this he
WAS aware - into something unprecedented since his original
appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes, held them
tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that
terror of vision. When he opened them the room, the other
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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 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: Emperor of the East was doing now? The sparkling
eyes and the delighted rubbing of hands made eloquent
answer -- this reverend crowd WOULD like to know what
that monarch was at, just as this moment. The fraud
went through some more mummery, and then made
grave announcement:
"The high and mighty Emperor of the East doth at
this moment put money in the palm of a holy begging
friar -- one, two, three pieces, and they be all of
silver."
A buzz of admiring exclamations broke out, all
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
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 Intentions by Oscar Wilde: of his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses that stirred
so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer
them to realise their energy, not on the lower plane of actual
life, where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so
made imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art where Love can
indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can stab the
eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave, and
make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one's father's
spirit, beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete
steel from misty wall to wall. Action being limited would have
left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it is
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