| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: It is a medium size fish of the true trout family,
resembling a rainbow except that it is of a rich
golden color. The peculiarity that makes its capture
a dream to be dreamed of is that it swims in but one
little stream of all the round globe. If you would
catch a Golden Trout, you must climb up under the
very base of the end of the High Sierras. There is
born a stream that flows down from an elevation of
about ten thousand feet to about eight thousand
before it takes a long plunge into a branch of the Kern
River. Over the twenty miles of its course you can
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: That such letters, so full of affection and confidence,
could have been so answered, Elinor, for Willoughby's sake,
would have been unwilling to believe. But her condemnation
of him did not blind her to the impropriety of their
having been written at all; and she was silently grieving
over the imprudence which had hazarded such unsolicited
proofs of tenderness, not warranted by anything preceding,
and most severely condemned by the event, when Marianne,
perceiving that she had finished the letters, observed to
her that they contained nothing but what any one would
have written in the same situation.
Sense and Sensibility |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: only make a bad business worse.
And now that you have delivered yourself of this strain, said Dionysodorus,
will you inform me whether Iolaus was the nephew of Heracles any more than
he is yours?
I suppose that I had best answer you, Dionysodorus, I said, for you will
insist on asking--that I pretty well know--out of envy, in order to prevent
me from learning the wisdom of Euthydemus.
Then answer me, he said.
Well then, I said, I can only reply that Iolaus was not my nephew at all,
but the nephew of Heracles; and his father was not my brother Patrocles,
but Iphicles, who has a name rather like his, and was the brother of
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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 The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: winter nights. The eye seemed as if it would fain dart fire at
Don Juan; he saw it thinking, upbraiding, condemning, uttering
accusations, threatening doom; it cried aloud, and gnashed upon
him. All anguish that shakes human souls was gathered there;
supplications the most tender, the wrath of kings, the love in a
girl's heart pleading with the headsman; then, and after all
these, the deeply searching glance a man turns on his fellows as
he mounts the last step of the scaffold. Life so dilated in this
fragment of life that Don Juan shrank back; he walked up and down
the room, he dared not meet that gaze, but he saw nothing else.
The ceiling and the hangings, the whole room was sown with living
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