| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: Their softest touch as smart as lizards' stings!
Their music frightful as the serpent's hiss,
And boding screech-owls make the consort full!
All the foul terrors in dark-seated hell--
QUEEN.
Enough, sweet Suffolk; thou torment'st thyself;
And these dread curses, like the sun 'gainst glass,
Or like an overcharged gun, recoil
And turns the force of them upon thyself.
SUFFOLK.
You bade me ban, and will you bid me leave?
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: going to a witch to discover whether you had gone to London or to
Huntingdon, and then writing solemnly to inform the Bishop of Ely of
his meritorious exertions!
In such a mad world as this was Paracelsus born. The son of a Swiss
physician, but of noble blood, Philip Aureolus Theophrastus was his
Christian name, Bombast von Hohenheim his surname, which last word
he turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus. Born in
1493 at Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz, which is still a
famous place of pilgrimage, he was often called Eremita--the hermit.
Erasmus, in a letter still extant, but suspected not to be genuine,
addressed him by that name.
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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 God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome
of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the
general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor
altruistic. It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an
inspiration in the finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow
which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a
happier earth. It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and
assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of
social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy
which is linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges
all to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation
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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 Mother by Owen Wister: Again I thought of Ethel and October, and what a difference it would be
to begin our modest housekeeping on sixty instead of forty thousand
dollars a year, outside of what I was earning. Mr. Beverly now rang a
bell. 'You happen to have come,' said he, 'on a morning when I can really
do something for you out of the common. Bring me (it was a clerk he
addressed) one of those Petunia circulars. Now here you can see at a
glance for yourself.' He began reading the prospectus rapidly aloud to me
while I followed its paragraphs with my own eye. His strong,
well-polished thumb-nail ran heavily but speedily down the columns of
figures and such words as gross receipts, increase of population, sinking
fund, redeemable at 105 after 1920, churned vigorously and meaninglessly
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