| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: a dead jade's stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Caesar, poor
wench, and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her
hair. This is a hard world in winter for wolves and wenches and
poor rogues like me."
"I," said the old man, "am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur de
Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what may you be?"
Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. "I am called Francis
Villon," he said, "a poor Master of Arts of this university. I
know some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can make chansons,
ballades, lais, virelais, and roundels, and I am very fond of wine.
I was born in a garret, and I shall not improbably die upon the
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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 Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: our aims.
I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken
petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time facilities for
research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C.
Vedder's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," we read:
It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr. Asquith's
temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through the opposition
of clergymen who had invested their savings in brewery stock, the
profits of which might have been lessened by the bill.
Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was
sufficient to put through Parliament a provision that no
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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 Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy: immoral until just previous to our seeing her. Then while away
from home she had gone with a man to a hotel, and probably had
also been with boys. These were her first and last experiences
of the sort, but how much these affairs had been on her mind we
obtained some intimation of from herself.
``My mother took me to S's when I was 8 years old and told me to
take anything I could and I got into the habit of it. I can't
stop myself. I take anything I want. Mother said she would kill
me if I told the truth. I had to say lots of things that were
not so. I had to lie and say mother did not beat me, but she had
a horsewhip that was plaited, father burned it. Then they bought
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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 Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either
wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off
and with laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see."
It was a random shot, and yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby's
notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his
hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased
all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary
legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada." attached
themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he
didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house
and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why
The Great Gatsby |
