| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: sentiment, passion, vice or crime, virtue or repentance which the
creating hand has put into it, and you will then comprehend how it is
that I read the soul of this foreigner--though what I have said does
not explain the gift of Specialism; for to conceive the nature of that
gift we must possess it."
Though Wilfrid belonged to the two first divisions of humanity, the
men of force and the men of thought, yet his excesses, his tumultuous
life, and his misdeeds had often turned him towards Faith; for doubt
has two sides; a side to the light and a side to the darkness. Wilfrid
had too closely clasped the world under its forms of Matter and of
Mind not to have acquired that thirst for the unknown, that longing to
Seraphita |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: So they came to the forest where the cell was.
Makovkina got out of the sledge, and told them to drive on. They
tried to dissuade her, but she grew irritable and ordered them to
go on.
When the sledges had gone she went up the path in her white
dogskin coat. The lawyer got out and stopped to watch her.
It was Father Sergius's sixth year as a recluse, and he was now
forty-nine. His life in solitude was hard--not on account of the
fasts and the prayers (they were no hardship to him) but on
account of an inner conflict he had not at all anticipated. The
sources of that conflict were two: doubts, and the lust of the
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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 Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: him, the darkness stood out.
"All earth is ours. And the day shall come, when the stars, looking down
on this little world, shall see no spot where the soil is moist and dark
with the blood of man shed by his fellow man; the sun shall rise in the
East and set in the West and shed his light across this little globe; and
nowhere shall he see man crushed by his fellows. And they shall beat their
swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
And instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree; and instead of the
brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and man shall nowhere crush man on
all the holy earth. Tomorrow's sun shall rise," said the stranger, "and it
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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 Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: from the vegetation of the Arctic zone to that of the Tropics. And
here and there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-basins, shaded
from the sun and always full of water, keep up in a higher zone the
vegetation of a lower one, and afford in nature an analogy to those
deep "barrancos" which split the high table-land of Mexico, down
whose awful cliffs, swept by cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks
from among the plants and animals of the temperate zone, and sees
far below, dim through their everlasting vapour-bath of rank hot
steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colours of a tropic forest.
"I do not wonder," says Mr. Gosse, in his charming "Naturalist's
Rambles on the Devonshire Coast" (p. 187), "that when Southey had
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