| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: no one and yet the ladder didn't come down of itself."
"No, it is Bazin."
"Ah! ah!" said D'Artagnan.
"But," continued Aramis, "Bazin is a well trained servant,
and seeing that I was not alone he discreetly retired. Sit
down, my dear friend, and let us talk." And Aramis pushed
forward a large easy-chair, in which D'Artagnan stretched
himself out.
"In the first place, you will sup with me, will you not?"
asked Aramis.
"Yes, if you really wish it," said D'Artagnan, "and even
Twenty Years After |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: CHAPTER III.
I WAS frankly, at the end of three days, a very prejudiced critic,
so that one morning when, in the garden, my great man had offered
to read me something I quite held my breath as I listened. It was
the written scheme of another book - something put aside long ago,
before his illness, but that he had lately taken out again to
reconsider. He had been turning it round when I came down on him,
and it had grown magnificently under this second hand. Loose
liberal confident, it might have passed for a great gossiping
eloquent letter - the overflow into talk of an artist's amorous
plan. The theme I thought singularly rich, quite the strongest he
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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 At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: of envy and admiration.
To figure in drawing-rooms with the reflected lustre of her husband's
fame, and to find other women envious of her, was to Augustine a new
harvest of pleasures; but it was the last gleam of conjugal happiness.
She first wounded her husband's vanity when, in spite of vain efforts,
she betrayed her ignorance, the inelegance of her language, and the
narrowness of her ideas. Sommervieux's nature, subjugated for nearly
two years and a half by the first transports of love, now, in the calm
of less new possession, recovered its bent and habits, for a while
diverted from their channel. Poetry, painting, and the subtle joys of
imagination have inalienable rights over a lofty spirit. These
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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 Glasses by Henry James: distinguish me in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then
it was it came home to me that my vision of her in her great
goggles had been cruelly final. As her beauty was all there was of
her, that machinery had extinguished her, and so far as I had
thought of her in the interval I had thought of her as buried in
the tomb her stern specialist had built. With the sense that she
had escaped from it came a lively wish to return to her; and if I
didn't straightway leave my place and rush round the theatre and up
to her box it was because I was fixed to the spot some moments
longer by the simple inability to cease looking at her.
She had been from the first of my seeing her practically
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