| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: returned home even more undecided than she had been before consulting
them. She now ventured to go to the house in the Rue du Colombier,
intending to confide her troubles to her father and mother; for she
was like a sick man who, in his desperate plight, tries every
prescription, and even puts faith in old wives' remedies.
The old people received their daughter with an effusiveness that
touched her deeply. Her visit brought them some little change, and
that to them was worth a fortune. For the last four years they had
gone their way like navigators without a goal or a compass. Sitting by
the chimney corner, they would talk over their disasters under the old
law of /maximum/, of their great investments in cloth, of the way they
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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 Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: The stranger paused when he saw Marguerite coming quickly
towards him, and just as she was about to slip past him, he said very
quietly:
"Citoyenne St. Just."
Marguerite uttered a little cry of astonishment, at thus
hearing her own familiar maiden name uttered so close to her. She
looked up at the stranger, and this time, with a cry of unfeigned
pleasure, she put out both her hands effusively towards him.
"Chauvelin!" she exclaimed.
"Himself, citoyenne, at your service," said the stranger,
gallantly kissing the tips of her fingers.
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: The older woman took her hand.
"I want to ask something of you."
"What is it?"
"I cannot quite explain to you. You will not understand. But there are
times when something more terrible can come into a life than it should lose
what it loves. If you have had a dream of what life ought to be, and you
try to make it real, and you fail; and something you have killed out in
your heart for long years wakes up and cries, 'Let each man play his own
game, and care nothing for the hand of his fellow! Each man for himself.
So the game must be played!' and you doubt all you have lived for, and the
ground seems washing out under your feet--." She paused. "Such a time has
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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 Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: security for those quiet, modest, and generally virtuous men, who,
as students of physical science, devoted their lives, during the
eighteenth century, to asking of nature--What are the facts of the
case?
It was no coincidence, but a connection of cause and effect, that
during the century of philosopher sound physical science throve, as
she had never thriven before; that in zoology and botany, chemistry
and medicine, geology and astronomy, man after man, both of the
middle and the noble classes, laid down on more and more sound,
because more and more extended foundations, that physical science
which will endure as an everlasting heritage to mankind; endure,
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