| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: with a lamp. The judge called for mote lights and the group stood
around the pool of blood on the floor of the study. Muller's arms
were crossed on his breast as he stood looking down at the hideous
spot. There was no terror in his eyes, as in those of the others,
but only a keen attention and a lively interest.
"Who has been in this room since the discovery?" he asked.
The doctor replied that only the servants of the immediate household,
the notary, the magistrate, and himself, then later the Count and
the district judge entered the room.
"You are quite certain that no one else has been in here?"
"No, no one else."
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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 Professor by Charlotte Bronte: still was motionless. I saw, indeed, her heart heave, her lips
were a little apart, her breathing grew somewhat hurried; the
child smiled; then at last the mother smiled too, and said in low
soliloquy, "God bless my little son!" She stooped closer over
him, breathed the softest of kisses on his brow, covered his
minute hand with hers, and at last started up and came away. I
regained the parlour before her. Entering it two minutes later
she said quietly as she put down her extinguished lamp--
"Victor rests well: he smiled in his sleep; he has your smile,
monsieur."
The said Victor was of course her own boy, born in the third year
The Professor |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which
I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not
why;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before
me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By
the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he
arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea,
that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least--in the
circumstances then surrounding me--there arose out of the pure
abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his
canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt
The Fall of the House of Usher |
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 Sophist by Plato: THEAETETUS: Why so?
STRANGER: To admit of two names, and to affirm that there is nothing but
unity, is surely ridiculous?
THEAETETUS: Certainly.
STRANGER: And equally irrational to admit that a name is anything?
THEAETETUS: How so?
STRANGER: To distinguish the name from the thing, implies duality.
THEAETETUS: Yes.
STRANGER: And yet he who identifies the name with the thing will be
compelled to say that it is the name of nothing, or if he says that it is
the name of something, even then the name will only be the name of a name,
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