| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: sealed it, and laid it before him without adding the address. The
second letter, begun at eleven o'clock, was not finished till mid-day.
The four pages were closely filled.
"That woman keeps running in my head," he muttered, as he folded this
second epistle and laid it before him, intending to direct it as soon
as he had ended his involuntary revery.
He crossed the two flaps of his flowered dressing-gown, put his feet
on a stool, slipped his hands into the pockets of his red cashmere
trousers, and lay back in a delightful easy-chair with side wings, the
seat and back of which described an angle of one hundred and twenty
degrees. He stopped drinking tea and remained motionless, his eyes
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: temper and vicious nature.
Sometimes she could not go to sleep, even when worn out with fatigue,
because her rage boiled so high over the day's experiences with her boy.
She would mumble and mutter to herself:
"He struck me en I warn't no way to blame--struck me in de face,
right before folks. En he's al'ays callin' me nigger wench, en hussy,
en all dem mean names, when I's doin' de very bes' I kin.
Oh, Lord, I done so much for him--I lif' him away up to what he is--
en dis is what I git for it."
Sometimes when some outrage of peculiar offensiveness stung her to
the heart, she would plan schemes of vengeance and revel in the fancied
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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 Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: the first blossoming of self-consciousness in the human
mind came the dawn of an immense cycle of experience--
a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil and
blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely
necessary and unavoidable--so now the redemption, the
return, the restoration has to come through another forward
step, in the same domain. Abandoning the quest and the
glorification of the separate isolated self we have to return
to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed
of this 'new' life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation,
and which all the expressions which I have just cited have
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
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 Tin Woodman of Oz by L. Frank Baum: and tough."
"I'm worse than that, considered as a breakfast,"
said the Bear, "for I'm only a skin stuffed with straw,
and therefore not fit to eat."
"Indeed!" cried the Jaguar, in a disappointed voice;
"then you must be a magic Bear, or enchanted, and I
must seek my breakfast from among your companions."
With this he raised his lean head to look up at the
Tin Owl and the Canary and the Monkey, and he lashed
his tail upon the ground and growled as fiercely as any
jaguar could.
The Tin Woodman of Oz |
