| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk
German to me--by request. One day, during a ramble about the city,
I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and
watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead,
and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room.
There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their
backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them
with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds.
Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows;
and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and
buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: To which honor Pelopidas aspired, but did not attain; he was killed by
the tyrant in the attempt. But to these you may perhaps oppose those two
most glorious battles at Leuctra and Tegyrae; and we have no statement of
any achievement of Marcellus, by stealth or ambuscade, such as were those
of Pelopidas, when he returned from exile, and killed the tyrants at
Thebes; which, indeed, may claim to be called the first in rank of all
achievements ever performed by secrecy and cunning. Hannibal was,
indeed, a most formidable enemy for the Romans but so for that matter
were the Lacedaemonians for the Thebans. And that these were, in the
fights of Leuctra and Tegyrae, beaten and put to fight by Pelopidas, is
confessed; whereas, Polybius writes, that Hannibal was never so much as
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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 Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: the bitter wind. Her hands and feet were stiff with cold when the
car at length loomed into sight again, and she thought of stopping
somewhere on the way to the ferry for a cup of tea; but before the
region of lunch-rooms was reached she had grown so sick and dizzy
that the thought of food was repulsive. At length she found
herself on the ferry-boat, in the soothing stuffiness of the
crowded cabin; then came another interval of shivering on a
street-corner, another long jolting journey in a "cross-town" car that
smelt of damp straw and tobacco; and lastly, in the cold spring dusk,
she unlocked her door and groped her way through the shop to her
fireless bedroom.
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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 Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: Where thirteen wretches sat in gloom,
Waiting - he thought he knew for whom:
He saw them drooping here and there,
Each feebly huddled on a chair,
In attitudes of blank despair:
Oysters were not more mute than they,
For all their brains were pumped away,
And they had nothing more to say -
Save one, who groaned "Three hours are gone!"
Who shrieked "We'll wait no longer, John!
Tell them to set the dinner on!"
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