| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister: immense. We shocked him."
"He's found the Bird-in-Hand!" cried Billy, quite suddenly.
"Oscar?" said Bertie, with an equal shout.
"No, John. John has. Came home last night and waked me up and told
me."
"Good for John," remarked Bertie, pensively.
Now, to the undergraduate mind of that day the Bird-in-Hand tavern was
what the golden fleece used to be to the Greeks,-- a sort of shining,
remote, miraculous thing, difficult though not impossible to find, for
which expeditions were fitted out. It was reported to be somewhere in
the direction of Quincy, and in one respect it resembled a ghost: you
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Macbeth by William Shakespeare: All. Come high or low:
Thy Selfe and Office deaftly show.
Thunder. 1. Apparation, an Armed Head.
Macb. Tell me, thou vnknowne power
1 He knowes thy thought:
Heare his speech, but say thou nought
1 Appar. Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth:
Beware Macduffe,
Beware the Thane of Fife: dismisse me. Enough.
He Descends.
Macb. What ere thou art, for thy good caution, thanks
Macbeth |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum: "Let's see the pigs," said Eureka, eagerly.
The little man felt carefully in his pocket and pulled out the tiny
piglets, setting them upon the grass one by one, where they ran around
and nibbled the tender blades.
"They're hungry, too," he said.
"Oh, what cunning things!" cried Dorothy, catching up one and petting it.
"Be careful!" said the piglet, with a squeal, "you're squeezing me!"
"Dear me!" murmured the Wizard, looking at his pets in astonishment.
"They can actually talk!"
"May I eat one of them?" asked the kitten, in a pleading voice. "I'm
awfully hungry."
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz |
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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of
finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions
and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the
ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked
up to a sense of the ugly - these uncanny phenomena placed him
rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the "swagger"
things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had
more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every
year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They
were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction,
of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It
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