| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: On no dear knees, a privileged babbler, clomb,
Nor knew the kindly feel of home.
My voice may reach you, O my dear-
A father's voice perhaps the child may hear;
And, pitying, you may turn your view
On that poor father whom you never knew.
Alas! alone he sits, who then,
Immortal among mortal men,
Sat hand in hand with love, and all day through
With your dear mother wondered over you.
OVER THE LAND IS APRIL
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lemorne Versus Huell by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard: accompanied by Mr. Uxbridge. He consulted mother in regard to our
marriage, and appointed it in November. In October Aunt Eliza sent
for me to come back to Bond Street and spend a week. She had some
fine marking to do, she wrote. While there I noticed a restlessness
in her which I had never before observed, and conferred with Mrs.
Roll on the matter. "She do be awake nights a deal, and that's the
reason," Mrs. Roll said. Her manner was the same in other respects.
She said she would not give me any thing for my wedding outfit, but
she paid my fare from Waterbury and back.
She could not spare me to go out, she told Mr. Uxbridge, and in
consequence I saw little of him while there.
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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 Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: where fairies rode and raced on "things," but what Mr. Skelmersdale
meant by "these here things they rode," there is no telling. Larvae,
perhaps, or crickets, or the little beetles that elude us so abundantly.
There was a place where water splashed and gigantic king-cups grew,
and there in the hotter times the fairies bathed together. There were
games being played and dancing and much elvish love-making, too,
I think, among the moss-branch thickets. There can be no doubt that
the Fairy Lady made love to Mr. Skelmersdale, and no doubt either
that this young man set himself to resist her. A time came, indeed,
when she sat on a bank beside him, in a quiet, secluded place
"all smelling of vi'lets," and talked to him of love.
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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 the Far East by Percival Lowell: much as noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print.
His birth, his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in
type, perhaps as sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of
his life. Mention of one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic
privilege, confined to the world of English society. In democratic
America, no doubt because all men there are supposed to be born free
and equal, we ignore the first event, and mention only the last two
episodes, about which our national astuteness asserts no such
effacing equality.
Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the
biography of an average man, let us look at these three momentous
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