| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: head sank down on the old sack, and the blue eyes were veiled by
their delicate half-transparent lids.
But where was Silas Marner while this strange visitor had come to
his hearth? He was in the cottage, but he did not see the child.
During the last few weeks, since he had lost his money, he had
contracted the habit of opening his door and looking out from time
to time, as if he thought that his money might be somehow coming
back to him, or that some trace, some news of it, might be
mysteriously on the road, and be caught by the listening ear or the
straining eye. It was chiefly at night, when he was not occupied in
his loom, that he fell into this repetition of an act for which he
Silas Marner |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: palfreys, with all their virginity about them, from mountain to
mountain and valley to valley- for, if it were not for some ruffian,
or boor with a hood and hatchet, or monstrous giant, that forced them,
there were in days of yore damsels that at the end of eighty years, in
all which time they had never slept a day under a roof, went to
their graves as much maids as the mothers that bore them. I say, then,
that in these and other respects our gallant Don Quixote is worthy
of everlasting and notable praise, nor should it be withheld even from
me for the labour and pains spent in searching for the conclusion of
this delightful history; though I know well that if Heaven, chance and
good fortune had not helped me, the world would have remained deprived
Don Quixote |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: I was a little late on the scene, and I felt, as he stood wistfully
looking out for me before the door of the inn at which the coach had
put him down, that I had seen him, on the instant, without and within,
in the great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity,
in which I had, from the first moment, seen his little sister.
He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it:
everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for him was swept away
by his presence. What I then and there took him to my heart for was
something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any child--
his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love.
It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater
|
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 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: was he'd planned to do if the evasion worked all right
and he managed to set a nigger free that was already
free before? And he said, what he had planned in his
head from the start, if we got Jim out all safe, was for
us to run him down the river on the raft, and have
adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then
tell him about his being free, and take him back up
home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his
lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the
niggers around, and have them waltz him into town
with a torchlight procession and a brass-band, and then
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
