| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: "No beer?" suggested the proprietor.
The boy made a shuddering face. "Don't say its name to me!" he
exclaimed. "I couldn't hold my breakfast down." He rang his
silver money upon the counter. "I've swore off for three months,"
he stated. "I'm going to be as pure as the snow!" And away he
went jingling out of the door, to ride seventy-five miles. Three
more months of hard, unsheltered work, and he would ride into
town again, with his adolescent blood crying aloud for its own.
"I'm obliged," said a new voice, rousing me from a new doze.
"She's easier this morning, since the medicine." This was the
engineer, whose sick wife had brought a hush over Medicine Bow's
The Virginian |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: They bustled about and got him some supper, and made him up a temporary bed,
where he soon fell asleep. Both went and looked at him as he lay.
"He called you Mother two or three times before he dropped off,"
murmured Jude. "Wasn't it odd that he should have wanted to!"
"Well--it was significant," said Sue. "There's more for us to think
about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the sky....
I suppose, dear, we must pluck up courage, and get that ceremony over?
It is no use struggling against the current, and I feel myself
getting intertwined with my kind. Oh Jude, you'll love me dearly,
won't you, afterwards! I do want to be kind to this child, and to be
a mother to him; and our adding the legal form to our marriage might make
Jude the Obscure |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: practice: and so must Angling. And note also, that in this Discourse I do
not undertake to say all that is known, or may be said of it, but I
undertake to acquaint the Reader with many things that are not usually
known to every Angler; and I shall leave gleanings and observations
enough to be made out of the experience of all that love and practice
this recreation, to which I shall encourage them. For Angling may be
said to be so like the Mathematicks, that it can never be fully learnt; at
least not so fully, but that there will still be more new experiments left
for the trial of other men that succeed us.
But I think all that love this game may here learn something that may
be worth their money, if they be not poor and needy men: and in case
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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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: But he had known many more people, and was far more highly skilled
in the art of narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were,
for the most part, of a curiously childlike and humorous kind,
so that it generally fell to her lot to listen and ask questions.
He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and felt,
and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other men
and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them.
According to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made
life reasonable, or if that word was foolish, made it of deep
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