| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Brother of Daphne by Dornford Yates: "Yes, I think so."
We had done our twenty miles out, and I was looking for a place
to turn the car, when I caught sight of Poganec below us in the
valley, by road some three or four miles away. Then suddenly for
the first time a terrible thought flashed into my mind. We were
on the very road which Berry and the others must take, coming
from Salzburg. Supposing we met them....
Here the road broadened, so I slowed down and, in response to a
nod from my mistress, proceeded to turn round. I accomplished
the manoeuvre as in a dream, and ended by stopping the engine.
This brought me to my senses. As we started off again, I became
The Brother of Daphne |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: reticent a man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending
himself against an imputation of slackness and unreliability I had
made in relation to a great public movement in which he had
disappointed me. But he plunged suddenly. "I have" he said, "a
preoccupation--"
"I know," he went on, after a pause that he devoted to the
study of his cigar ash, "I have been negligent. The fact is--it
isn't a case of ghosts or apparitions--but--it's an odd thing to
tell of, Redmond--I am haunted. I am haunted by something--that
rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings
. . . . ."
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: and British skippers came no more, and it was cer-
tain that no Russian ship would visit California
again until the treaty was signed and official news
of it had made its slow way to these uttermost
shores. She had resented, in her young ambition
and indocility, the chance that had stranded her,
equipped for civilization, on this rim of the world,
but never so much as in that moment, when she sat
with arrested breath and realized to the full the
primitive conditions of a country thousands of miles
from the very outposts of Europe, and with never
Rezanov |
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 Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: not your fault, Annie; but you have ruined me!"
Poor Owen Warland! He had indeed erred, yet pardonably; for if
any human spirit could have sufficiently reverenced the processes
so sacred in his eyes, it must have been a woman's. Even Annie
Hovenden, possibly might not have disappointed him had she been
enlightened by the deep intelligence of love.
The artist spent the ensuing winter in a way that satisfied any
persons who had hitherto retained a hopeful opinion of him that
he was, in truth, irrevocably doomed to unutility as regarded the
world, and to an evil destiny on his own part. The decease of a
relative had put him in possession of a small inheritance. Thus
Mosses From An Old Manse |
