| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: two or more views of the subject in hand; combines,
implicates, and contrasts them; and while, in one sense, he
was merely seeking an occasion for the necessary knot, he
will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the
meaning, or to have transacted the work of two sentences in
the space of one. In the change from the successive shallow
statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminous
flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast
amount of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly
see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and
stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: alas! is not here; I sent it down to the cottage, with all my
mail, for Fanny; on Sunday night a boy comes up with a
lantern and a note from Fanny, to say the woods are full of
Atuas and I must bring a horse down that instant, as the
posts are established beyond her on the road, and she does
not want to have the fight going on between us. Impossible
to get a horse; so I started in the dark on foot, with a
revolver, and my spurs on my bare feet, leaving directions
that the boy should mount after me with the horse. Try such
an experience on Our Road once, and do it, if you please,
after you have been down town from nine o'clock till six, on
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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 Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family
he had deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his
face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the
wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually,
with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only
from his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it
in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to
retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that
mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his
friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music;
and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which
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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 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the
feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive
to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream,
I bent my mind towards injury and death. When I thought of my friends,
of the mild voice of De Lacey, the gentle eyes of Agatha, and the
exquisite beauty of the Arabian, these thoughts vanished and a
gush of tears somewhat soothed me. But again when I reflected
that they had spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger, and
unable to injure anything human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects.
As night advanced I placed a variety of combustibles around the cottage,
and after having destroyed every vestige of cultivation in the garden, I waited
Frankenstein |
