| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: the next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair,
he opened the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album.
The whole thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion
the same lady put another question. "What is your title?"
"I haven't one."
"Oh, _I_ have!" I said. But Douglas, without heeding me,
had begun to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering
to the ear of the beauty of his author's hand.
I
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops,
a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: "She was a Cadignan, my dear, niece of the old Prince de Cadignan,
consequently cousin to the present Duc de Maufrigneuse."
Madame Firmiani is a Cadignan. She might have neither virtue, nor
wealth, nor youth, but she would still be a Cadignan; it is like a
prejudice, always alive and working.
An Original: "My dear fellow, I've seen no galoshes in her
antechamber; consequently you can visit her without compromising
yourself, and play cards there without fear; if there ARE any
scoundrels in her salons, they are people of quality and come in their
carriages; such persons never quarrel."
Old man belonging to the genus Observer: "If you call on Madame
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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 Paradise Lost by John Milton: Easy my unpremeditated verse:
Since first this subject for heroick song
Pleas'd me long choosing, and beginning late;
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroick deem'd chief mastery to dissect
With long and tedious havock fabled knights
In battles feign'd; the better fortitude
Of patience and heroick martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe races and games,
Or tilting furniture, imblazon'd shields,
Paradise Lost |
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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: It hadn't come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience;
it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of
chance, the insolence of accident. Now that the illumination had
begun, however, it blazed to the zenith, and what he presently
stood there gazing at was the sounded void of his life. He gazed,
he drew breath, in pain; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he
had before him in sharper incision than ever the open page of his
story. The name on the table smote him as the passage of his
neighbour had done, and what it said to him, full in the face, was
that she was what he had missed. This was the awful thought, the
answer to all the past, the vision at the dread clearness of which
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