| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The School For Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan: a Trick? to trepan my Brother too?
SIR PETER. Nay you tell me you are SURE He is innocent--if so you
do him the greatest service in giving him an opportunity to clear
himself--and--you will set my Heart at rest--come you shall not refuse
me--here behind this Screen will be--hey! what the Devil--there seems
to be one listener here already--I'll swear I saw a Petticoat.--
SURFACE. Ha! ha! ha! Well this is ridiculous enough--I'll tell you,
Sir Peter--tho' I hold a man of Intrigue to be a most despicable
Character--yet you know it doesn't follow that a man is to be an
absolute Joseph either--hark'ee--'tis a little French Milliner--
a silly Rogue that plagues me--and having some character, on your
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from King Lear by William Shakespeare: When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to th' creating a whole tribe of fops
Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
King Lear |
| 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: House-freedom as a generalization, the abolition of freedom as a
specification. Accordingly, so long as the name of freedom was
respected, and only its real enforcement was prevented in a legal way,
of course the constitutional existence of freedom remained uninjured,
untouched, however completely its common existence might be
extinguished.
This Constitution, so ingeniously made invulnerable, was, however, like
Achilles, vulnerable at one point: not in its heel, but in its head, or
rather, in the two heads into which it ran out-the Legislative Assembly,
on the one hand, and the President on the other. Run through the
Constitution and it will be found that only those paragraphs wherein the
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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 Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: topic about the streets. High-Place Hall was undergoing
repair; a lady was coming there to live shortly; all the
shop-people knew it, and had already discounted the chance
of her being a customer.
Elizabeth-Jane could, however, add a capping touch to
information so new to her in the bulk. The lady, she said,
had arrived that day.
When the lamps were lighted, and it was yet not so dark as
to render chimneys, attics, and roofs invisible, Elizabeth,
almost with a lover's feeling, thought she would like to
look at the outside of High-Place Hall. She went up the
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
