| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: I might have trembled on that summer morning;
I might have wavered; and I might have failed.
And there are many among men today
To say of me that I had best have wavered.
So has it been, so shall it always be,
For those of us who give ourselves to die
Before we are so parcelled and approved
As to be slaughtered by authority.
We do not make so much of what they say
As they of what our folly says of us;
They give us hardly time enough for that,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: these securities it gives rises in certain cases to terrible
bankruptcy.
The territorial tax did not entirely disappear in Rabourdin's plan,--
he kept a minute portion of it as a point of departure in case of war;
but the productions of the soil were freed, and industry, finding raw
material at a low price, could compete with foreign nations without
the deceptive help of customs. The rich carried on the administration
of the provinces without compensation except that of receiving a
peerage under certain conditions. Magistrates, learned bodies,
officers of the lower grades found their services honorably rewarded;
no man employed by the government failed to obtain great consideration
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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 Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: was their opportunity to gain the Goat and Bagpipes unobserved and
change their tell-tale garments. Yet even then it was advisable to
go round by the outskirts, and not run the gauntlet of the market-
place, where, in the concourse of people, they stood the more
imminent peril to be recognised and slain.
This course was a long one. It took them not far from the house by
the beach, now lying dark and silent, and brought them forth at
last by the margin of the harbour. Many of the ships, as they
could see by the clear moonshine, had weighed anchor, and,
profiting by the calm sky, proceeded for more distant parts;
answerably to this, the rude alehouses along the beach (although in
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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 Lin McLean by Owen Wister: four hours alone on the train."
But his face that evening round the fire, when they talked of their next
day's welcome to the new agent, became comedy of the highest, and he was
so desperately canny in the moments he chose for silence or for comment!
He had not been sure of their ignorance until he arrived, and it was a
joke with him too deep for laughter. He had a special eye upon the
Virginian, his mate in such a tale of mischiefs, and now he led him on.
He suggested to the Southerner that caution might be wise; this change at
Separ was perhaps some new trick of the company's.
"We mostly take their tricks," observed the Virginian.
"Yes," said Lin, nodding sagely at the fire, "that's so, too."
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