| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: And let their liquid droppings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S'io credesse chc mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa Gamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno viva alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: appetite, had overpowered all human sensibilities. In that little
space I had seen frank and undisguised human nature under two
very different aspects, in such a sort that there was a certain
grotesque element in the very midst of a most terrible tragedy.
The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon
racked his brains to discover a reason for his niece's tears. The
lady's husband silently digested his dinner; content, apparently,
with the Countess' rather vague explanation, sent through the
maid, putting forward some feminine ailment as her excuse. We all
went early to bed.
As I passed the door of the Countess' room on the way to my
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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 War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: phere and obscured its more familiar features.
Even the daily papers woke up to the disturbances at
last, and popular notes appeared here, there, and everywhere
concerning the volcanoes upon Mars. The seriocomic periodi-
cal PUNCH, I remember, made a happy use of it in the
political cartoon. And, all unsuspected, those missiles the
Martians had fired at us drew earthward, rushing now at a
pace of many miles a second through the empty gulf of
space, hour by hour and day by day, nearer and nearer. It
seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with
that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their
War of the Worlds |
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 An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac: which he is bound. Without looking further into this calling, it is
easy to see that the man who follows it puts as much passionate ardor
into his chase as another man does into the pursuit of game. Therefore
the further these men advanced in their investigations the more eager
they became; but the expression of their faces and their eyes
continued calm and cold, just as their ideas, their suspicions, and
their plans remained impenetrable. To any one who watched the effects
of the moral scent, if we may so call it, of these bloodhounds on the
track of hidden facts, and who noted and understood the movements of
canine agility which led them to strike the truth in their rapid
examination of probabilities, there was in it all something actually
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