| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the
christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must
have been neglected: 'He shall be able to see,' 'He shall be able
to tell,' 'He shall be able to charm,' said the friendly
godmothers; 'But he shall not be able to hear,' exclaimed the last.
The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred, when
the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months
later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread
like a fire about the valley, and in less than a year two
survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created solitude.
A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races, the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: King Leonidas said to one who held him in discourse upon some useful
matter, but not in due time and place, "Much to the purpose, Sir,
elsewhere." King Charilaus, the nephew of Lycurgus, being asked why his
uncle had made so few laws, answered, "Men of few words require but few
laws." When one blamed Hecataeus the sophist because that, being
invited to the public table, he had not spoken one word all supper-time,
Archidamidas answered in his vindication, "He who knows how to speak,
knows also when. "
The sharp and yet not ungraceful retorts which I mentioned may be
instanced as follows. Demaratus, being asked in a troublesome manner by
an importunate fellow, Who was the best man in Lacedaemon? answered at
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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 Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: central mountains.
Encircling barrier-reefs are of all sizes, from three miles
to no less than forty-four miles in diameter; and that which
fronts one side, and encircles both ends, of New Caledonia,
is 400 miles long. Each reef includes one, two, or several
rocky islands of various heights; and in one instance, even
as many as twelve separate islands. The reef runs at a
greater or less distance from the included land; in the
Society archipelago generally from one to three or four
miles; but at Hogoleu the reef is 20 miles on the southern
side, and 14 miles on the opposite or northern side, from the
The Voyage of the Beagle |
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 Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically balanced
application of these forces, theoretically possible, is
practically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have the
same weakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured of
running after panaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere of
morals, ideals. One generation sets up duty, renunciation,
self-sacrifice as a panacea. The next generation, especially the
women, wake up at the age of forty or thereabouts to the fact
that their lives have been wasted in the worship of this ideal,
and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who imposed
it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments
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