| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
But was it nothing but looks, people said? What was there behind it--her
beauty and splendour? Had he blown his brains out, they asked, had he
died the week before they were married--some other, earlier lover, of whom
rumours reached one? Or was there nothing? nothing but an incomparable
beauty which she lived behind, and could do nothing to disturb? For
easily though she might have said at some moment of intimacy when stories
of great passion, of love foiled, of ambition thwarted came her way how
she too had known or felt or been through it herself, she never spoke.
She was silent always. She knew then--she knew without having learnt.
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of
To the Lighthouse |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
And clustering nenuphars
Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!
Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed! -
Come while the rose is red, -
While blue-eyed Summer smiles
On the green ripples round you sunken piles
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,
And on the sultry air
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!
Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: Erskine, subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid,
turbulent phrases, to a perfect passion of alarmed self-
respect and vanity. He had been muzzled, and muzzled, when
all was said, by his paltry salary as an exciseman; alas! had
he not a family to keep? Already, he wrote, he looked
forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as
this: "Burns, notwithstanding the FANFARONNADE of
independence to be found in his works, and after having been
held forth to view and to public estimation as a man of some
genius, yet, quite destitute of resources within himself to
support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled into a paltry
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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 The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: nervous, high-strung man, overwrought by brooding for years on what
he called his wrongs, and I did not know what he might do if I
refused his request. It was not of myself I thought in this
connection, but of the girl at home who looked to me for protection.
"I had no fear for myself; it never occurred to me to think of
taking a weapon with me. How my revolver - and it is undoubtedly
my revolver, for there was a peculiar break in the silver
ornamentation on the handle which is easily recognisable - how this
revolver of mine got into his room, is more than I can say. Until
the Police Commissioner showed it to me two or three days ago, I
had no idea that it was not in the box in my study where it is
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