| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: proposed a nightly mounted patrol for every district. And in
particular he offered, as being himself a member of the university,
that the students should form themselves into a guard, and go out
by rotation to keep watch and ward from sunset to sunrise.
Arrangements were made toward that object by the few people who
retained possession of their senses, and for the present we
separated.
Never, in fact, did any events so keenly try the difference between
man and man. Some started up into heroes under the excitement.
Some, alas for the dignity of man! drooped into helpless
imbecility. Women, in some cases, rose superior to men, but yet
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: goes forward on a scale so great as to fill me with surprise. In
the houses of the working class, all day long there will be a foot
upon the stair; all day long there will be a knocking at the doors;
beggars come, beggars go, without stint, hardly with intermission,
from morning till night; and meanwhile, in the same city and but a
few streets off, the castles of the rich stand unsummoned. Get the
tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was always the poor who
helped him; get the truth from any workman who has met misfortunes,
it was always next door that he would go for help, or only with
such exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the course of
the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters that he trails
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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 Concerning Christian Liberty by Martin Luther: works, which are done over and above for the subjection of the
body, since you have abundance for yourself through your faith,
in which God has given you all things?
We give this rule: the good things which we have from God ought
to flow from one to another and become common to all, so that
every one of us may, as it were, put on his neighbour, and so
behave towards him as if he were himself in his place. They
flowed and do flow from Christ to us; He put us on, and acted for
us as if He Himself were what we are. From us they flow to those
who have need of them; so that my faith and righteousness ought
to be laid down before God as a covering and intercession for the
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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 Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: the hideous devilfish of the Gulf,--gigantic, flat-bodied, black,
with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a
bat,--the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors? From all
these, perhaps, and from other monsters likewise--goblin shapes
evolved by Nature as destroyers, as equilibrists, as
counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which, unhindered,
would thicken the deep into one measureless and waveless ferment
of being... But when there are many bathers these perils are
forgotten,--numbers give courage,--one can abandon one's self,
without fear of the invisible, to the long, quivering, electrical
caresses of the sea ...
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