| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: the ape-man close above his own.
Grimly the fingers tightened upon the mate's throat. He tried
to scream, to plead, but no sound came forth. His eyes
protruded as he struggled for freedom, for breath, for life.
Jane Clayton seized her husband's hands and tried to drag them
from the throat of the dying man; but Tarzan only shook his head.
"Not again," he said quietly. "Before have I permitted
scoundrels to live, only to suffer and to have you suffer for
my mercy. This time we shall make sure of one scoundrel--
sure that he will never again harm us or another," and with
a sudden wrench he twisted the neck of the perfidious mate
The Beasts of Tarzan |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells: Lady Hardy at a luncheon party. He was seated next to her and
he found her a very pleasing and sympathetic person indeed.
She talked to him freely and simply of her husband and of the
journey the two men had taken together. Either she knew
nothing of the circumstances of their parting or if she did
she did not betray her knowledge. "That holiday did him a
world of good," she said. "He came back to his work like a
giant. I feel very grateful to you."
Dr. Martineau said it was a pleasure to have helped Sir
Richmond's work in any way. He believed in him thoroughly.
Sir Richmond was inspired by great modern creative ideas.
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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 The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft.
Notes 196 and 197 were transposed in this and the Hogarth Press edition,
but have been corrected here.
210. 'Carriage and insurance free'] 'cost, insurance and freight'--Editor.
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
The Waste Land |
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 In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: Yet the work was accomplished. By dusk, when his majesty withdrew,
the town was founded and complete, a new and ruder Amphion having
called it from nothing with three cracks of a rifle. And the next
morning the same conjurer obliged us with a further miracle: a
mystic rampart fencing us, so that the path which ran by our doors
became suddenly impassable, the inhabitants who had business across
the isle must fetch a wide circuit, and we sat in the midst in a
transparent privacy, seeing, seen, but unapproachable, like bees in
a glass hive. The outward and visible sign of this glamour was no
more than a few ragged coco-leaf garlands round the stems of the
outlying palms; but its significance reposed on the tremendous
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