| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: bringing the war to a close, but without explaining his plans to
anyone, and with no authority from the government, beyond
permission to pass through the military lines and return. His
scheme was utterly impracticable, and Mr. Lincoln was interested
in the report of his visit only because it showed that the
rebellion was nearing its end. This was so marked that he sent
Mr. Blair back again to Richmond with a note intended for the eye
of Jefferson Davis, saying that the government had constantly
been, was then, and would continue to be ready to receive any
agent Mr. Davis might send, "with a view of securing peace to the
people of our one common country."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: inclined, produced a large and growing crop of the most amusing ideas,
the most curious expressions, the most absurd fables concerning this
mysterious individual. Without being precisely a vampire, a ghoul, a
fictitious man, a sort of Faust or Robin des Bois, he partook of the
nature of all these anthropomorphic conceptions, according to those
persons who were addicted to the fantastic. Occasionally some German
would take for realities these ingenious jests of Parisian evil-
speaking. The stranger was simply /an old man/. Some young men, who
were accustomed to decide the future of Europe every morning in a few
fashionable phrases, chose to see in the stranger some great criminal,
the possessor of enormous wealth. Novelists described the old man's
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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 Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who
admired Mozart. They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and of
the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it is
scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the
wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them. By patience,
however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain
knowledge, though small in amount.
If the health of John Mayrant's mother, I learned, had allowed that lady
to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth.
His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions,
was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster bring
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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 Hellenica by Xenophon: that self-knowledge I would have you make a careful computation of
your good qualities and satisfy yourselves on the strength of which of
these it is that you claim to rule over us. Is it that you are more
just than ourselves? Yet the people, who are poorer--have never
wronged you for the purposes of plunder; but you, whose wealth would
outweight the whole of ours, have wrought many a shameful deed for the
sake of gain. If, then, you have no monopoly of justice, can it be on
the score of courage that you are warranted to hold your heads so
high? If so, what fairer test of courage will you propose than the
arbitrament of war--the war just ended? Or do you claim superiority of
intelligence?--you, who with all your wealth of arms and walls, money
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