| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: on them.
It was long past midnight when he rose, took his father's sword
from the wall where it hung, and unsheathed it. A vision of an
open fireplace in a log house rose before him, his father in the
foreground looking like a picture of Stonewall Jackson. The kind
brave eyes that were the soul of honor gazed at him.
"You damned scoundrel! You damned scoundrel!" Jeff accused himself
in a low voice.
He knew his little friend was good and innocent, but he knew too
she had inherited a temperament that made her very innocence a
anger to her. Every instinct of chivalry called upon him to
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Love and Friendship by Jane Austen: the elder of which Daughters was married to the King of Scotland
and had the happiness of being grandmother to one of the first
Characters in the World. But of HER, I shall have occasion to
speak more at large in future. The youngest, Mary, married first
the King of France and secondly the D. of Suffolk, by whom she
had one daughter, afterwards the Mother of Lady Jane Grey, who
tho' inferior to her lovely Cousin the Queen of Scots, was yet an
amiable young woman and famous for reading Greek while other
people were hunting. It was in the reign of Henry the 7th that
Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel before mentioned made their
appearance, the former of whom was set in the stocks, took
Love and Friendship |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: about her, and there was nothing that, as the centre of a group of
giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about
herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass,
playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all
promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main
business with her would be just to have a go at her head and to
arrange in that view for an early sitting. It would have been as
impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would have been
to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went
forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing
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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 Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: the illegitimate relationship decided him; that consideration might
have great influence on the mind of his master. Once decided,
Beauvouloir had confidence in the chances and changes of life; it
might be that the duke would die before the marriage; besides, there
were many examples of such marriage; a peasant girl in Dauphine,
Francoise Mignot, had lately married the Marechal d'Hopital; the son
of the Connetable Anne de Montmorency had married Diane, daughter of
Henri II. and a Piedmontese lady named Philippa Duc.
During this mental deliberation in which paternal love measured all
probabilities and discussed both the good and the evil chances,
striving to foresee the future and weighing its elements, Gabrielle
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