| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: Thy looks should nothing thence, but sweetness tell.
How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!
XCIV
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: And ring of sound- so much the elements
Can bring about by change of order alone.
But those which are the primal germs of things
Have power to work more combinations still,
Whence divers things can be produced in turn.
Now let us also take for scrutiny
The homeomeria of Anaxagoras,
So called by Greeks, for which our pauper-speech
Yieldeth no name in the Italian tongue,
Although the thing itself is not o'erhard
For explanation. First, then, when he speaks
Of The Nature of Things |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and
was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's "History of New England
Witchcraft," in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently
believed.
He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and
simple credulity. His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers
of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been
increased by his residence in this spell-bound region. No tale
was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was
often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the
afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
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 Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one upheld
from beneath. Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever
higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and
tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping
gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin,
to her ears, to her mouth. . . . Ah, now it was rising too high;
the impulse to struggle was renewed;. . . her mouth was full;. . .
she was choking. . . . Help!
"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with
official composure.
The clock struck three. They remembered it afterward. Someone
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