| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: slitting mill, and a considerable stockholder in the cotton
factories. The inhabitants felt their own prosperity interested
in his fate. Such was the excitement, that the Parker's Falls
Gazette anticipated its regular day of publication, and came out
with half a form of blank paper and a column of double pica
emphasized with capitals, and headed HORRID MURDER OF MR.
HIGGINBOTHAM! Among other dreadful details, the printed account
described the mark of the cord round the dead man's neck, and
stated the number of thousand dollars of which he had been
robbed; there was much pathos also about the affliction of his
niece, who had gone from one fainting fit to another, ever since
Twice Told Tales |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: strait of Messina and landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the
time when Corinth in the East and Carthage in the West fell before
the resistless wave of empire and the eagles of Rome passed on the
wings of universal victory from Calpe and the Pillars of Hercules
to Syria and the Nile. At the same time he recognised that the
scheme of Rome's empire was worked out under the aegis of God's
will. (14) For, as one of the Middle Age scribes most truly says,
the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of Polybius is that
power which we Christians call God; the second aim, as one may call
it, of his history is to point out the rational and human and
natural causes which brought this result, distinguishing, as we
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: pronounced in state of siege, a condition that continues down to this
moment. [#4 January, 1852]
The bulk of the Mountain had left its vanguard in the lurch by refusing
their signatures to the proclamation; the press had deserted: only two
papers dared to publish the pronunciamento; the small traders had
betrayed their Representatives: the National Guards stayed away, or,
where they did turn up, hindered the raising of barricades; the
Representatives had duped the small traders: nowhere were the alleged
affiliated members from the Army to be seen; finally, instead of
gathering strength from them, the democratic party had infected the
proletariat with its own weakness, and, as usual with democratic feats,
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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 Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: danger, secrecy, and doubtful rectitude. Not one
of the four boys had had a vacation from the village
that summer, and their young minds had become
charged, as it were, with the seeds of revolution and
rebellion. Jim Patterson, the son of the rector, and
of them all the most venturesome, had planned to
take -- he called it "take"; he meant to pay for it,
anyway, he said, as soon as he could shake enough
money out of his nickel savings-bank -- one of his
father's Plymouth Rock chickens and have a chicken-
roast in the woods back of Dr. Trumbull's. He
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