| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: was scarcely conscious of their true charm. She did not dare to
express to herself, in words, that one everlasting joy of woman's
heart, through all trials and sorrows--"I have loved, I have been
beloved."
On the last "First-day" before their departure, she walked down the
meadows to the lonely brake between the hills. It was the early
spring, and the black buds of the ash had just begun to swell. The
maples were dusted with crimson bloom, and the downy catkins of the
swamp-willow dropped upon the stream and floated past her, as
once the autumn leaves. In the edges of the thickets peeped forth
the blue, scentless violet, the fairy cups of the anemone, and the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: He consoled himself by playing for awhile on a cheap flageolet,
which was one of his diversions, and to which I owed many intervals
of peace. When he first produced it, in the joints, from his
pocket, he had the duplicity to ask me if I played upon it. I
answered, no; and he put the instrument away with a sigh and the
remark that he had thought I might. For some while he resisted the
unspeakable temptation, his fingers visibly itching and twittering
about his pocket, even his interest in the landscape and in
sporadic anecdote entirely lost. Presently the pipe was in his
hands again; he fitted, unfitted, refitted, and played upon it in
dumb show for some time.
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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 Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: age of twenty, the possessor of two hundred francs. He had studied the
law, working in an attorney's office, where he had risen to be
superior clerk. He had taken his doctor's degree in law, had mastered
the old and modern codes, and could hold his own with the most famous
pleaders. He had studied the law of nations, and was familiar with
European treaties and international practice. He had studied men and
things in five capitals--London, Berlin, Vienna, Petersburg, and
Constantinople.
No man was better informed than he as to the rules of the Chamber. For
five years he had been reporter of the debates for a daily paper. He
spoke extempore and admirably, and could go on for a long time in that
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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 Symposium by Plato: might split an egg with an hair; and when this was done, he told Apollo to
give their faces a twist and re-arrange their persons, taking out the
wrinkles and tying the skin in a knot about the navel. The two halves went
about looking for one another, and were ready to die of hunger in one
another's arms. Then Zeus invented an adjustment of the sexes, which
enabled them to marry and go their way to the business of life. Now the
characters of men differ accordingly as they are derived from the original
man or the original woman, or the original man-woman. Those who come from
the man-woman are lascivious and adulterous; those who come from the woman
form female attachments; those who are a section of the male follow the
male and embrace him, and in him all their desires centre. The pair are
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