| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: together. A set of Bixiou's drawings to illustrate life in the
debtors' prison, led the conversation to take this particular turn;
and from debtors' prisons they went to debts.
It was midnight. They had broken up into little knots round the table
and before the fire, and gave themselves up to the burlesque fun which
is only possible or comprehensible in Paris and in that particular
region which is bounded by the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Chaussee
d'Antin, the upper end of the Rue de Navarin and the line of the
boulevards.
In ten minutes' time they had come to an end of all the deep
reflections, all the moralizings, small and great, all the bad puns
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: love of God and man, working out His will at a further stage in the
heavenly pilgrimage. And yet we acknowledge that these are the things
which eye hath not seen nor ear heard and therefore it hath not entered
into the heart of man in any sensible manner to conceive them. Fourthly,
there may have been some moments in our own lives when we have risen above
ourselves, or been conscious of our truer selves, in which the will of God
has superseded our wills, and we have entered into communion with Him, and
been partakers for a brief season of the Divine truth and love, in which
like Christ we have been inspired to utter the prayer, 'I in them, and thou
in me, that we may be all made perfect in one.' These precious moments, if
we have ever known them, are the nearest approach which we can make to the
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: Mohammed was a man who could have accepted that great truth in all its
fulness, had he but been taught it. He certainly felt the evil of
polyamy so strongly as to restrict it in every possible way, except the
only right way--namely, the proclamation of the true ideal of marriage.
But his ignorance, mistake, sin, if you will, was a deflection from the
right law, from the true constitution of man, and therefore it avenged
itself. That chivalrous respect for woman, which was so strong in the
early Mohammedans, died out. The women themselves--who, in the first
few years of Islamism, rose as the men rose, and became their helpmates,
counsellors, and fellow-warriors--degenerated rapidly into mere
playthings. I need not enter into the painful subject of woman's
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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 The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: slightly in its own waves as it edged away. It moved slowly through
the shipping and out until, catching the swell of the channel, it shot
ahead at top speed.
For an hour Sara Lee stood there. The channel wind caught her and tore
at her skirts until she was almost frozen. And finally, in sheer
desperation, she worked her way round to the other side. She saw no
one. Save for the beating heart of the engine below it might have been
a dead ship.
On the other side she found an open door and stumbled into the tiny dark
deck cabin, as chilled and frightened a philanthropist as had ever
crossed that old and tricky and soured bit of seaway. And there, to be
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