| 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: At you, and you are not a pleasant sight.
"Forbear, forgive. Ten years are on my soul,
And on my conscience. I've an incubus:
My one distinction, and a parlous toll
To glory; but hope lives on clamorous.
"'Twas hope, though heaven I grant you knows of what --
The kind that blinks and rises when it falls,
Whether it sees a reason why or not --
That heard Broadway's hard-throated siren-calls;
"'Twas hope that brought me through December storms,
To shores again where I'll not have to be
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: "One of the Spectre order:
You'll very often see him dressed
In a yellow gown, a crimson vest,
And a night-cap with a border.
"He tried the Brocken business first,
But caught a sort of chill ;
So came to England to be nursed,
And here it took the form of THIRST,
Which he complains of still.
"Port-wine, he says, when rich and sound,
Warms his old bones like nectar:
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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 The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: winding forest floor, green with grass and fern, colorful with flower and
rock. A thousand aisles, glades, nooks, and caverns called her to come.
Nature was every woman's mother. The populated city was a delusion. Disease
and death and corruption stalked in the shadows of the streets. But her
canyon promised hard work, playful hours, dreaming idleness, beauty,
health, fragrance, loneliness, peace, wisdom, love, children, and long
life. In the hateful shut-in isolation of her room Carley stretched forth
her arms as if to embrace the vision. Pale close walls, gleaming placid
stretches of brook, churning amber and white rapids, mossy banks and
pine-matted ledges, the towers and turrets and ramparts where the eagles
wheeled--she saw them all as beloved images lost to her save in anguished
The Call of the Canyon |
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 A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: LORD ILLINGWORTH. American women are wonderfully clever in
concealing their parents.
LADY HUNSTANTON. My dear Lord Illingworth, what do you mean? Miss
Worsley, Caroline, is an orphan. Her father was a very wealthy
millionaire or philanthropist, or both, I believe, who entertained
my son quite hospitably, when he visited Boston. I don't know how
he made his money, originally.
KELVIL. I fancy in American dry goods.
LADY HUNSTANTON. What are American dry goods?
LORD ILLINGWORTH. American novels.
LADY HUNSTANTON. How very singular! . . . Well, from whatever
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