| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: unseen, and looked as if they had been blooming a long while,
though there had been no trace of them the day before yesterday;
birds began not to mind getting wet. In-door people said they had
heard the nightingale, to which out-door people replied
contemptuously that they had heard him a fortnight before.
The young doctor's practice being scarcely so large as a London
surgeon's, he frequently walked in the wood. Indeed such practice
as he had he did not follow up with the assiduity that would have
been necessary for developing it to exceptional proportions. One
day, book in hand, he walked in a part of the wood where the trees
were mainly oaks. It was a calm afternoon, and there was
The Woodlanders |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: because of his refusal to submit to the injustice of his foreman.
The yellow light of the few lanterns show nothing but high board
walls and snow drifts, stone heaps, and now and then the remains
of a neglected garden. Here and there a stunted tree or a wild
shrub bent their twigs under the white burden which the winter had
laid upon them. Ludwig Amster, who had walked this street for
several years, knew his path so well that he could take it
blindfolded. The darkness did not worry him, but he walked somewhat
more slowly than usual, for he knew that under the thin covering of
fresh-fallen snow there lay the ice of the night before. He walked
carefully, watching for the slippery places.
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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 The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of
terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves
might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have
care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise
with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies
merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and
freedom. The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It
requires more unselfishness. Anybody can sympathise with the
sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature - it
requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist - to
sympathise with a friend's success.
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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 Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: they said, 'is for my father broken on the wheel. This for my
brother in the galleys. That for my mother or my sister imprisoned
in your cursed convents.' Each gave his blow and his reason; and
then all kneeled and sang psalms around the body till the dawn.
With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away towards Frugeres,
farther up the Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance, leaving Du
Chayla's prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with two-and-
fifty wounds upon the public place.
'Tis a wild night's work, with its accompaniment of psalms; and it
seems as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that
town upon the Tarn. But the story does not end, even so far as
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