| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: For just an instant he hesitated, standing there trembling and
with bared fangs, glaring at his foe; but he was well trained
and had been out with me quite as much as he had with Bowen--in
fact, I had had most to do with his early training; then he
walked slowly and very stiff-legged to his place behind me.
Du-seen, red with rage, would have had it out with the two of
us had not Al-tan drawn him to one side and whispered in his
ear--upon which, with a grunt, the Galu walked straight back to
the opposite end of the hall, while Nobs and I continued upon
our way toward the hut and Ajor. As we passed out into the
village plaza, I saw Chal-az--we were so close to one another
The People That Time Forgot |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: party however small, if his example had been followed by a
hundred or by thirty of his fellows, I cannot but believe it
would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and
justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so little
fervour, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they
cause; but when we see them wake an active horror in our
fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prison
rather than be so much as passively implicated in their
perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realise
them with a quicker pulse.
Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was
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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 A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: dress. Want of taste is a defect inseparable from false pietism.
And so, in the home-life that needs the fullest sympathy, Granville
had no true companionship. He went out alone to parties and the
theatres. Nothing in his house appealed to him. A huge Crucifix that
hung between his bed and Angelique's seemed figurative of his destiny.
Does it not represent a murdered Divinity, a Man-God, done to death in
all the prime of life and beauty? The ivory of that cross was less
cold than Angelique crucifying her husband under the plea of virtue.
This it was that lay at the root of their woes; the young wife saw
nothing but duty where she should have given love. Here, one Ash
Wednesday, rose the pale and spectral form of Fasting in Lent, of
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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 Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: but the Spanish element in her; or, indeed, in anything else. As
Cary said to him once, using a cant phrase of Sidney's, which he
had picked up from Frank, all heaven and earth were "spaniolated,"
to him. He seemed to recollect nothing but that Heaven had "made
Spaniards to be killed, and him to kill them." If he had not been
the most sensible of John Bulls, he would certainly have
forestalled the monomania of that young Frenchman of rank, who,
some eighty years after him, so maddened his brain by reading of
the Spanish cruelties, that he threw up all his prospects and
turned captain of filibusters in the West Indies, for the express
purpose of ridding them of their tyrants; and when a Spanish ship
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