| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: least said to myself in bewildered hours. I could see meanwhile
the torch she refused to pass on flame away in her chamber of
memory - pour through her eyes a light that shone in her lonely
house. At the end of six months I was fully sure of what this warm
presence made up to her for. We had talked again and again of the
man who had brought us together - of his talent, his character, his
personal charm, his certain career, his dreadful doom, and even of
his clear purpose in that great study which was to have been a
supreme literary portrait, a kind of critical Vandyke or Velasquez.
She had conveyed to me in abundance that she was tongue-tied by her
perversity, by her piety, that she would never break the silence it
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: VIVIE. Nonsense. What about bed? It's past ten.
MRS WARREN [passionately] Whats the use of my going to bed? Do
you think I could sleep?
VIVIE. Why not? I shall.
MRS WARREN. You! youve no heart. [She suddenly breaks out
vehemently in her natural tongue--the dialect of a woman of the
people--with all her affectations of maternal authority and
conventional manners gone, and an overwhelming inspiration of
true conviction and scorn in her] Oh, I wont bear it: I wont put
up with the injustice of it. What right have you to set yourself
up above me like this? You boast of what you are to me--to m e,
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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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: on both sides. Cominius, to avoid this inconvenience, divided his army,
marching himself with one body to encounter the Volscians on their
approach from without, and leaving Titus Lartius, one of the bravest
Romans of his time, to command the other and continue the siege. Those
within Corioli, despising now the smallness of their number, made a
sally upon them, and prevailed at first, and pursued the Romans into
their trenches. Here it was that Marcius, flying out with a slender
company, and cutting those in pieces that first engaged him, obliged the
other assailants to slacken their speed; and then, with loud cries,
called upon the Romans to renew the battle. For he had, what Cato
thought a great point in a soldier, not only strength of hand and
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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 Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: A creeper when the prop is broken, fell
The woman shrieking at his feet, and swoon'd.
Then her own people bore along the nave
Her pendent hands, and narrow meagre face
Seam'd with the shallow cares of fifty years:
And here the Lord of all the landscape round
Ev'n to its last horizon, and of all
Who peer'd at him so keenly, follow'd out
Tall and erect, but in the middle aisle
Reel'd, as a footsore ox in crowded ways
Stumbling across the market to his death,
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