| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: the prince's first inquiry was for the prisoner he had been on the point
of taking at the moment when his habeas corpus was so unseasonably suspended.
He was told that his people had been on the point of securing the said
prisoner, when the devil suddenly appeared among them in the likeness
of a tall friar, having his grey frock cinctured with a sword-belt,
and his crown, which whether it were shaven or no they could not see,
surmounted with a helmet, and flourishing an eight-foot staff,
with which he laid about him to the right and to the left, knocking down
the prince and his men as if they had been so many nine-pins: in fine,
he had rescued the prisoner, and made a clear passage through friend and foe,
and in conjunction with a chosen party of archers, had covered the retreat
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs: At last darkness came, and with it they approached and
entered the village. They kept to unlighted side streets until
they met a villager, of whom they inquired their way to
some private house where they might obtain refreshments.
The fellow scrutinized them with evident suspicion.
"There is an inn yonder," he said, pointing toward the
main street. "You can obtain food there. Why should re-
spectable folk want to go elsewhere than to the public inn?
And if you are afraid to go there you must have very good
reasons for not wanting to be seen, and--" he stopped short
as though assailed by an idea. "Wait," he cried, excitedly,
The Mad King |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: faith. We are not here to judge them. That peculiar subtlety of mind,
which rendered the Alexandrians the great thinkers of the then world,
had with Christians, as well as Heathens, the effect of alluring them
away from practice to speculation. The Christian school, as was to be
expected from the moral ground of their philosophy, yielded to it far
more slowly than the Heathen, but they did yield, and especially after
they had conquered and expelled the Heathen school. Moreover, the long
battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them habits of
exclusiveness, of denunciation; the spirit which cannot assert a fact,
without dogmatising rashly and harshly on the consequences of denying
that fact. Their minds assumed a permanent habit of combativeness.
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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 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: for employment; - on along the railway, which came in at the same
gates and which branches down between each vast block - past a
pilot-engine butting refractory trucks into their places - on to
the last block, [and] down the branch, sniffing the guano-scented
air and detecting the old bones. The hartshorn flavour of the
guano becomes very strong, as I near the docks where, across the
ELBA'S decks, a huge vessel is discharging her cargo of the brown
dust, and where huge vessels have been discharging that same cargo
for the last five months.' This was the walk he took his young
wife on the morrow of his return. She had been used to the society
of lawyers and civil servants, moving in that circle which seems to
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