| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Foolish Virgin by Thomas Dixon: "I love it."
"Water and hills both right together! I reckon my
father must 'a' been a sea-captain and my mother from
the mountains----"
He said this with a pathos that found the girl's
heart. What a pitiful, lonely life, a boy's without
even the memory of a mother or father! The mother
instinct rose in a resistless flood of pity. Her eyes
grew suddenly dim.
"Well," he said briskly, "now for the dainty job!
I've got to jump my way through that Coney Island
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: I Bed in Summer
II A Thought
III At the Sea-side
IV Young Night-Thought
V Whole Duty of Children
VI Rain
VII Pirate Story
VIII Foreign Lands
IX Windy Nights
X Travel
XI Singing
A Child's Garden of Verses |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Out of Time's Abyss by Edgar Rice Burroughs: He felt the thing that carried him rise to a greater altitude,
and below he glimpsed momentarily the second white-robed figure;
then the creature above sounded a low call, it was answered from
below, and instantly Bradley felt the clutching talons release
him; gasping for breath, he hurtled downward through space.
For a terrifying instant, pregnant with horror, Bradley fell;
then something swooped for him from behind, another pair of
talons clutched him beneath the arms, his downward rush was
checked, within another hundred feet, and close to the surface
of the sea he was again borne upward. As a hawk dives for a
songbird on the wing, so this great, human bird dived for Bradley.
Out of Time's Abyss |
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 Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: circumstance of Mrs Varden's having frequently pronounced the word
'Grace' with much emphasis; which word, entering the portals of Mr
Willet's brain as they stood ajar, and coupling itself with the
words 'before meat,' which were there ranging about, did in time
suggest a particular kind of meat together with that description of
vegetable which is usually its companion.
The search was wholly unsuccessful. Joe had groped along the path
a dozen times, and among the grass, and in the dry ditch, and in
the hedge, but all in vain. Dolly, who was quite inconsolable for
her loss, wrote a note to Miss Haredale giving her the same account
of it that she had given at the Maypole, which Joe undertook to
Barnaby Rudge |
