| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: The timber-merchant laid his hand upon the stone, and was
humanized. "Jack, my wronged friend!" he said. "I'll be faithful
to my plan of making amends to 'ee."
When he reached home that evening, he said to Grace and Mrs.
Melbury, who were working at a little table by the fire,
"Giles wants us to go down and spend an hour with him the day
after to-morrow; and I'm thinking, that as 'tis Giles who asks us,
we'll go."
They assented without demur, and accordingly the timber-merchant
sent Giles the next morning an answer in the affirmative.
Winterborne, in his modesty, or indifference, had mentioned no
The Woodlanders |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: 218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character',
is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.
Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into
the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct
from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman,
and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact,
is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is
of great anthropological interest:
. . . Cum Iunone iocos et 'maior vestra profecto est
Quam, quae contingit maribus', dixisse, 'voluptas.'
Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti
The Waste Land |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey: miserable one for him, yet he could not bring himself to leave the room.
He never saw Snap touch her; he never heard Mescal's voice; he believed
that she spoke very little. When the hour was over and Mescal rose to
pass to her room, then his doubt, his fear, his misery, were as though
they had never been, for as Mescal said good-night she would give him one
look, swift as a flash, and in it were womanliness and purity, and some-
thing beyond his comprehension. Her Indian serenity and mysticism veiled
yet suggested some secret, some power by which she might yet escape the
iron band of this Mormon rule. Hare could not fathom it. In that
good-night glance was a meaning for him alone, if meaning ever shone in
woman's eyes, and it said: "I will be true to you and to myself!"
The Heritage of the Desert |
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 Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar: calm and proud-looking, in a cool, pale yellow gown was
apparently enjoying herself without paying the slightest
attention to her young host.
"Have I the pleasure of this dance?" he asked her finally, in a
lull of the music.
She bowed assent, and as if moved by a common impulse they
strolled out of the dancing-room into the cool, quaint garden,
where jessamines gave out an overpowering perfume, and a caged
mocking-bird complained melodiously to the full moon in the sky.
It must have been an engrossing tete-a-tete, for the call to
supper had sounded twice before they heard and hurried into the
The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories |
