| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: which, with other scientific inquiries, he called on in the intervals
of money-making and politics to the end of his life. In 1748 he
sold his business in order to get leisure for study, having now
acquired comparative wealth; and in a few years he had made discoveries
that gave him a reputation with the learned throughout Europe. In
politics he proved very able both as an administrator and as a
controversialist; but his record as an office-holder is stained by
the use he made of his position to advance his relatives. His most
notable service in home politics was his reform of the postal system;
but his fame as a statesman rests chiefly on his services in connection
with the relations of the Colonies with Great Britain, and later with
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from United States Declaration of Independence: He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing
with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions,
to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers,
incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large
for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed
to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States;
for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners;
refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither,
and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
United States Declaration of Independence |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: savings. She occupied, in the rue du Bercail, one of those melancholy
ground-floor apartments which a traveller passing along the principal
street of a little provincial town can look through at a glance. The
street door opened at the top of three steep steps; a passage led to
an interior courtyard, at the end of which was the staircase covered
by a wooden gallery. On one side of the passage was the dining-room
and the kitchen; on the other side, a salon put to many uses, and the
widow's bedchamber.
Athanase Granson, a young man twenty-three years of age, who slept in
an attic room above the second floor of the house, added six hundred
francs to the income of his poor mother, by the salary of a little
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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 King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: No, prelate; such is thy audacious wickedness,
Thy lewd, pestiferous and dissentious pranks,
As very infants prattle of thy pride.
Thou art a most pernicious usurer,
Froward by nature, enemy to peace;
Lascivious, wanton, more than well beseems
A man of thy profession and degree;
And for thy treachery, what's more manifest
In that thou laid'st a trap to take my life,
As well at London-bridge as at the Tower.
Beside, I fear me, if thy thoughts are sifted
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