| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: buried in the deep beech-woods, which once were a great forest,
stretching in a ring round the north of London, full of deer and
boar, and of wild bulls too, even as late as the twelfth century,
according to the old legend of Thomas e Becket's father and the
fair Saracen, which you have often heard.
I know. But how are you going to get through the chalk hills? Is
there a tunnel as there is at Box and at Micheldever?
No. Something much prettier than a tunnel and something which
took a great many years longer in making. We shall soon meet with
a very remarkable and famous old gentleman, who is a great adept
at digging, and at landscape gardening likewise; and he has dug
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: as he recognised how long he had waited, or how long at least his
companion had. That she, at all events, might be recorded as
having waited in vain--this affected him sharply, and all the more
because of his it first having done little more than amuse himself
with the idea. It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition
grew, and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself
ended by watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of
his outer person, may pass for another of his surprises. This
conjoined itself still with another, the really stupefying
consciousness of a question that he would have allowed to shape
itself had he dared. What did everything mean--what, that is, did
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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 Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: In what moonlight-tangled meshes of perfume,
Where the clustering keovas guard the squirrel's slumber,
Where the deep woods glimmer with the jasmine's bloom?
I'll feed thee, O beloved, on milk and wild red honey,
I'll bear thee in a basket of rushes, green and white,
To a palace-bower where golden-vested maidens
Thread with mellow laughter the petals of delight.
Whither dost thou loiter, by what murmuring hollows,
Where oleanders scatter their ambrosial fire?
Come, thou subtle bride of my mellifluous wooing,
Come, thou silver-breasted moonbeam of desire!
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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 The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: incomparable novelist we have now in England, Mr George Meredith.
There are better artists in France, but France has no one whose
view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true. There
are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of
what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in
fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought.
One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive.
There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and
symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving
figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the
public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted,
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