| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: When, after a long and happy journey in Italy, the Comtesse de
Vandenesse returned to Paris late in the following winter, all her
husband's predictions about Nathan were justified. He had taken
Blondet's advice and negotiated with the government, which employed
his pen. His personal affairs were in such disorder that one day, on
the Champs-Elysees, Marie saw her former adorer on foot, in shabby
clothes, giving his arm to Florine. When a man becomes indifferent to
the heart of a woman who has once loved him, he often seems to her
very ugly, even horrible, especially when he resembles Nathan. Madame
de Vandenesse had a sense of personal humiliation in the thought that
she had once cared for him. If she had not already been cured of all
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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 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: steal over me again. When in Mr. Gardner's employ-
ment, I was kept in such a perpetual whirl of ex-
citement, I could think of nothing, scarcely, but
my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot
my liberty. I have observed this in my experience
of slavery,--that whenever my condition was im-
proved, instead of its increasing my contentment,
it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to
thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found
that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to
make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: brings with it a faint, floating haze, a cunning
decolourizer, although not thick enough to obscure
outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to
windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the
Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the
Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea
fog.
Immediately underneath upon the south, you command
the yards of the High School, and the towers and courts
of the new Jail - a large place, castellated to the
extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
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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 Augsburg Confession by Philip Melanchthon: inseparably enjoined in one Person, one Christ, true God and
true man, who was born of the Virgin Mary, truly suffered, was
crucified, dead, and buried, that He might reconcile the
Father unto us, and be a sacrifice, not only for original
guilt, but also for all actual sins of men
He also descended into hell, and truly rose again the third
day; afterward He ascended into heaven that He might sit on
the right hand of the Father, and forever reign and have
dominion over all creatures, and sanctify them that believe in
Him, by sending the Holy Ghost into their hearts, to rule,
comfort, and quicken them, and to defend them against the
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