| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tara was confined. Darkness hid the interior behind the first
window that he approached. The second opened upon a lighted
chamber where he could see a guard sleeping at his post outside a
door. Here also was the top of the runway leading to the next
level below. Passing still farther around the tower Gahan
approached another window, but now he clung to that side of the
tower which ended in a courtyard a hundred feet below and in a
short time the light of Thuria would reach him. He realized that
he must hasten and he prayed that behind the window he now
approached he would find Tara of Helium.
Coming to the opening he looked in upon a small chamber dimly
 The Chessmen of Mars |
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: amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.
But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously
treated. In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known
instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is
still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that
it proposes to exercise over people's private lives seems to me to
be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an
insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth
knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like
habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the
public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite
|