| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: TO DICK, ON HIS SIXTH BIRTHDAY
TO ROSE
THE FOUNTAIN
THE ROSE
DREAMS
"I AM NOT YOURS"
PIERROT'S SONG
NIGHT IN ARIZONA
DUSK IN WAR TIME
SPRING IN WAR TIME
WHILE I MAY
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: visible; the stillness and the silence magnified that rugged pile,--
really sombre, though tinted by the dreamer, and beautiful beneath its
scanty vegetation, the warm chamomile, the Venus' tresses with their
velvet leaves. Oh, lingering festival; oh, glorious decorations; oh,
happy exaltation of human forces! Once already the lake of Brienne had
spoken to me thus. The rock of Croisic may be perhaps the last of
these my joys. If so, what will become of Pauline?
"Have you had a good catch to-day, my man?" I said to the fisherman.
"Yes, monsieur," he replied, stopping and turning toward us the
swarthy face of those who spend whole days exposed to the reflection
of the sun upon the water.
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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 Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: wells. Water, you must remember, just as it is life when pure, is
death when foul. For it can carry, unseen to the eve, and even
when it looks clear and sparkling, and tastes soft and sweet,
poisons which have perhaps killed more human beings than ever were
killed in battle. You have read, perhaps, how the Athenians, when
they were dying of the plague, accused the Lacedaemonians outside
the walls of poisoning their wells; or how, in some of the
pestilences of the Middle Ages, the common people used to accuse
the poor harmless Jews of poisoning the wells, and set upon them
and murdered them horribly. They were right, I do not doubt, in
their notion that the well-water was giving them the pestilence:
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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 Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: slope the eye embraced a large space of poplar'd plain upon the one
hand, the waving hill-tops of the forest on the other, and Gretz
itself in the middle, a handful of roofs. Under the bestriding
arch of the blue heavens, the place seemed dwindled to a toy. It
seemed incredible that people dwelt, and could find room to turn or
air to breathe, in such a corner of the world. The thought came
home to the boy, perhaps for the first time, and he gave it words.
'How small it looks!' he sighed.
'Ay,' replied the Doctor, 'small enough now. Yet it was once a
walled city; thriving, full of furred burgesses and men in armour,
humming with affairs; - with tall spires, for aught that I know,
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