| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: unintelligible to the commissioner's somewhat dormant comprehension,
but giving evidence of bewilderment and hesitation.
The voice was feminine; the commissioner was of the race of cavaliers
who make salaam before the trail of a skirt without considering the
quality of its cloth.
There stood in the door a faded woman, one of the numerous sisterhood
of the unhappy. She was dressed all in black--poverty's perpetual
mourning for lost joys. Her face had the contours of twenty and the
lines of forty. She may have lived that intervening score of years in
a twelve-month. There was about her yet an aurum of indignant,
unappeased, protesting youth that shone faintly through the premature
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: plain-spoken.
"You say so?" he mumbled. "Chut! Then you will go. There are
some--bull-dog, men. They do what they please,--they never die
unless they choose, begar! We know them in our practice, Herr
Holmes!"
Holmes laughed. Some acumen there, he thought, in medicine or
mind: as for himself, it was true enough; whatever success he had
gained in life had been by no flush of enthusiasm or hope; a
dogged persistence of "holding on," rather.
A long time; but Christmas eve came at last: bright, still,
frosty. "Whatever he had to do, let it be done quickly;" but not
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean,
and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers
on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of
the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the
converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes
and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily
widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As
an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary
architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim
to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse
have been its portion. There is no sign of American interference,
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: long may we persist, or rather be compelled--as it were by blind
instinct, to train our boys upon those old Greek dreams; and confess,
whenever we try to find a substitute for them in our educational
schemes, that we have as yet none? Because those old Greek stories do
represent the Deities as the archetypes, the kinsmen, the teachers, the
friends, the inspirers of men. Because while the schoolboy reads how
the Gods were like to men, only better, wiser, greater; how the Heroes
are the children of the Gods, and the slayers of the monsters which
devour the earth; how Athene taught men weaving, and Phoebus music, and
Vulcan the cunning of the stithy; how the Gods took pity on the noble-
hearted son of Danae, and lent him celestial arms and guided him over
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