| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: As if they did the talking when he asked you for the news.
"That's all, my son. Were I to talk for half a hundred years
I'd never clear away from there the cloud that never clears.
We buried what was left of it, -- the bar, too, and the chains;
And only for the apple tree there's nothing that remains."
Forty years ago it was I heard the old man say,
"That's all, my son." -- And here again I find the place to-day,
Deserted and told only by the tree that knows the most,
And overgrown with golden-rod as if there were no ghost.
Hillcrest
(To Mrs. Edward MacDowell)
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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 Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: Dunderheads not broad enough to separate social from political
intercourse would be quick to talk unpleasantly about it.
Deflecting from the path into a carriage driveway, he came through
a woody hollow to the rear of The Brakes. The grounds were
spacious, rolling toward the road beyond in a falling sweep of
wellkept lawn. He skirted the green till he came to a "raveled
walk that zig-zagged up through the grass, leaving to the left the
rough fern-clad bluff that gave the place its name.
The man who let him in had apparently received his instructions,
for he led Farnum to a rather small room in the rear of the big
house. Its single occupant was reclining luxuriantly among a
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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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have
no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my
father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured,
not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the
public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I
had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word
among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had
given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools
that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered
then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.
My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should
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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 Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Which now cross'd the threshold, in company walking together.
To his parents Hermann presented her, hastily saying:--
"Here is a maiden just of the sort you are wishing to have here,
Welcome her kindly, dear father! she fully deserves it, and you too,
Mother dear, ask her questions as to her housekeeping knowledge,
That you may see how well she deserves to form one of our party."
Then he hastily took on one side the excellent pastor,
Saying:--" Kind sir, I entreat you to help me out of this trouble
Quickly, and loosen the knot, whose unravelling I am so dreading;
For I have not ventured to woo as my bride the fair maiden,
But she believes she's to be a maid in the house, and I fear me
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