| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: to the back shelves. He caught up a copy, tossing the money to an
astonished clerk who pursued him to the door with the unheeded
offer to wrap up the volumes.
In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if
he were to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a
cab and drove straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf
fans of a perspiring crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his
train to start.
He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared
not draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the
folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret
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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 Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: table, where he laid out his papers and prepared to take down his
notes. Popinot had still kept his eye on M. d'Espard; he was watching
the effect on him of this crude statement, so painful for a man in
full possession of his reason. The Marquis d'Espard, whose face was
usually pale, as are those of fair men, suddenly turned scarlet with
anger; he trembled for an instant, sat down, laid his paper on the
chimney-piece, and looked down. In a moment he had recovered his
gentlemanly dignity, and looked steadily at the judge, as if to read
in his countenance the indications of his character.
"How is it, monsieur," he asked, "that I have had no notice of such a
petition?"
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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 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: mad, and others immediately faint. This discourse extremely
affected me, and called to my mind Friday's ecstasy when he met his
father, and the poor people's ecstasy when I took them up at sea
after their ship was on fire; the joy of the mate of the ship when
he found himself delivered in the place where he expected to
perish; and my own joy, when, after twenty-eight years' captivity,
I found a good ship ready to carry me to my own country. All these
things made me more sensible of the relation of these poor men, and
more affected with it.
Having thus given a view of the state of things as I found them, I
must relate the heads of what I did for these people, and the
Robinson Crusoe |
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 Pupil by Henry James: deeper. When he tried to figure to himself the morning twilight of
childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw it was never fixed,
never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant he touched it, was
already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing
that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn't
know. It seemed to him that he himself knew too much to imagine
Morgan's simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle.
The boy paid no heed to his last remark; he only went on: "I'd
have spoken to them about their idea, as I call it, long ago, if I
hadn't been sure what they'd say."
"And what would they say?"
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