| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: to have a tussle with you."
"Poh, poh!" grumbled Antaeus, only half awake. "None of your
nonsense, my little fellow! Don't you see I'm sleepy? There is
not a Giant on earth for whom I would take the trouble to get
up."
But the Pygmy looked again, and now perceived that the stranger
was coming directly towards the prostrate form of Antaeus. With
every step, he looked less like a blue mountain, and more like
an immensely large man. He was soon so nigh, that there could
be no possible mistake about the matter. There he was, with the
sun flaming on his golden helmet, and flashing from his
Tanglewood Tales |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element
of the population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic
Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking
in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some
special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each
special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the
distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible
silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers made us
declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and
one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he
will live here." The enemy obtained a number of these bills and
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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 Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: of Science to the general history of the human race? Had Desplein
that universal command of knowledge which makes a man the living
word, the great figure of his age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he
saw into the sufferer and his malady by an intuition, natural or
acquired, which enabled him to grasp the diagnostics peculiar to
the individual, to determine the very time, the hour, the minute
when an operation should be performed, making due allowance for
atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual
temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he
then studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the
elements contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to
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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 Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: you know of what he was accused and convicted? Of having, as
an accomplice of Cornelius de Witt, concealed the
correspondence of the Grand Pensionary and the Marquis de
Louvois."
"Well, sir, he was ignorant of this correspondence being
deposited with him; completely ignorant. I am as certain as
of my life, that, if it were not so, he would have told me;
for how could that pure mind have harboured a secret without
revealing it to me? No, no, your Highness, I repeat it, and
even at the risk of incurring your displeasure, Cornelius is
no more guilty of the first crime than of the second; and of
The Black Tulip |
