| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum: wicked thief if he wouldn't hurt a fly. Where is he?"
"He went fishing about two months ago and hasn't come back yet,"
explained Button-Bright.
"Then I can't see that he will be of much use to us in this trouble,"
sighed little Trot. "But p'raps Ozma, who is a fairy, can get away
from the thieves without any help from anyone."
"She MIGHT be able to," answered Dorothy reflectively, "but if she had
the power to do that, it isn't likely she'd have let herself be
stolen. So the thieves must have been even more powerful in magic
than our Ozma."
There was no denying this argument, and although they talked the
The Lost Princess of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a
book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas. As for
that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the
sun always rises in the East-End, the only thing that can be said
about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.
'In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as ROBERT
ELSMERE has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy de
Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style,
strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us
foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in
which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot
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