| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: forest. It's difficult. Have you counted the trees?"
"How count the trees?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing, still
trying to draw his friend out of his ill-temper. "Count the
sands of the sea, number the stars. Some higher power might do
it."
"Oh, well, the higher power of Ryabinin can. Not a single
merchant ever buys a forest without counting the trees, unless
they get it given them for nithing, as you're doing now. I know
your forest. I go there every year shooting, and your forest's
worth a hundred and fifty roubles and acre paid dwon, while he's
giving you sixty by installments. So that in fact you're making
Anna Karenina |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs: remarked to Byrne after they had been on the trail for the
better part of an hour. "Hadn't we better wait for them to
catch up with us? Four can do a whole lot more than two."
"Not wen Billy Byrne's one of de two," replied the mucker,
and continued doggedly along the trail.
Another half-hour brought them suddenly in sight of a
native village, and Billy Byrne was for dashing straight into
the center of it and "cleaning it up," as he put it, but
Theriere put his foot down firmly on that proposition, and
finally Byrne saw that the other was right.
"The trail leads straight toward that place," said Theriere,
The Mucker |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: The board always met in the evening, as the business hours of the
members prevented their giving the day to their deliberations.
Upon the night of the letting of the contract the first man to
arrive was McGaw. He ran up the stairs hurriedly, found no one he
was looking for, and returned to O'Leary's, where he was joined by
Justice Rowan and his brother John, the contractor, Quigg,
Crimmins, and two friends of the Union. During the last week the
Union was outspoken in its aid of McGaw, and its men had quietly
passed the word of "Hands off this job!" about in the
neighborhood. If McGaw got the work--and there was now not the
slightest doubt of it--he would, of course, employ all Union men.
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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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: type and fixed it, and the dream of a Virgilian poet, either at
Jerusalem or at Babylon, became in the long progress of the
centuries incarnate in him for whom the world was waiting.
To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that
the Christ's own renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at
Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis
of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, was not
allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and
spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch,
and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal
French tragedy, and St. Paul's Cathedral, and Pope's poetry, and
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