| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: If he could only have felt resentment towards her he would have been
less unhappy; but he pitied while he contemned her.
Jude turned and retraced his steps. Drawing again towards
the station he started at hearing his name pronounced--
less at the name than at the voice. To his great surprise
no other than Sue stood like a vision before him--her look
bodeful and anxious as in a dream, her little mouth nervous,
and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry.
"Oh, Jude--I am so glad--to meet you like this!" she said in quick,
uneven accents not far from a sob. Then she flushed as she observed
his thought that they had not met since her marriage.
Jude the Obscure |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: As for myself, let the Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone, of
how often I wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the Lovable. Yet
he was a man of whom we knew nothing. Beyond the fact that he was
Kentucky-born, his past was a blank. He never spoke of it. And he was a man
who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from emotion. To him the
world spelled itself out in problems. I charged him once with being guilty of
emotion when roaring round the den with the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so, he
held. Could he not cuddle a sense-delight for the problem's sake?
He was elusive. A man who intermingled nameless argot with polysyllabic and
technical terms, he would seem sometimes the veriest criminal, in speech,
face, expression, everything; at other times the cultured and polished
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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 The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: the door. When the light of the room fell upon her face he
started, and, hardly knowing what he did, crossed the threshold to
her, placing his hands upon her two arms, while surprise, joy,
alarm, sadness, chased through him by turns. With Grace it was
the same: even in this stress there was the fond fact that they
had met again. Thus they stood,
"Long tears upon their faces, waxen white
With extreme sad delight."
He broke the silence by saying in a whisper, "Come in."
"No, no, Giles!" she answered, hurriedly, stepping yet farther
back from the door. "I am passing by--and I have called on you--I
The Woodlanders |
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 Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: say it is precisely what we're talking about. It stretches, this
little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else,
comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form,
the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the
initiated a complete representation of it. So it's naturally the
thing for the critic to look for. It strikes me," my visitor
added, smiling, "even as the thing for the critic to find."
This seemed a responsibility indeed. "You call it a little trick?"
"That's only my little modesty. It's really an exquisite scheme."
"And you hold that you've carried the scheme out?"
"The way I've carried it out is the thing in life I think a bit
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