| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: on the edges of large glasses, crossed bamboo ladders, dispersed into
all the corners, and produced strange musical effects by the combination
of their various pitches of tone. The jugglers tossed them in the air,
threw them like shuttlecocks with wooden battledores, and yet they kept
on spinning; they put them into their pockets, and took them out
still whirling as before.
It is useless to describe the astonishing performances of the acrobats
and gymnasts. The turning on ladders, poles, balls, barrels, &c.,
was executed with wonderful precision.
But the principal attraction was the exhibition of the Long Noses,
a show to which Europe is as yet a stranger.
Around the World in 80 Days |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: and he gazed at Cosette, saying: "Oh! what a kindly wound!
Oh! what a good misfortune!"
Cosette on perceiving that her father was ill, had deserted the pavilion
and again taken a fancy to the little lodging and the back courtyard.
She passed nearly all her days beside Jean Valjean and read to him
the books which he desired. Generally they were books of travel.
Jean Valjean was undergoing a new birth; his happiness was reviving
in these ineffable rays; the Luxembourg, the prowling young stranger,
Cosette's coldness,--all these clouds upon his soul were growing dim.
He had reached the point where he said to himself: "I imagined all that.
I am an old fool."
Les Miserables |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: PEPELO, Uma said, some lie, some calumny; and all she knew of it
was that the girls who had been jealous of her luck with Ioane used
to twit her with his desertion, and cry out, when they met her
alone in the woods, that she would never be married. "They tell me
no man he marry me. He too much 'fraid," she said.
The only soul that came about them after this desertion was Master
Case. Even he was chary of showing himself, and turned up mostly
by night; and pretty soon he began to table his cards and make up
to Uma. I was still sore about Ioane, and when Case turned up in
the same line of business I cut up downright rough.
"Well," I said, sneering, "and I suppose you thought Case 'very
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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 Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther: So, too, no good work can profit an unbeliever to justification
and salvation; and, on the other hand, no evil work makes him an
evil and condemned person, but that unbelief, which makes the
person and the tree bad, makes his works evil and condemned.
Wherefore, when any man is made good or bad, this does not arise
from his works, but from his faith or unbelief, as the wise man
says, "The beginning of sin is to fall away from God"; that is,
not to believe. Paul says, "He that cometh to God must believe"
(Heb. xi. 6); and Christ says the same thing: "Either make the
tree good and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and
his fruit corrupt" (Matt. xii. 33),--as much as to say, He who
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