| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: again, till he had to jump into a pool to make himself stop.
Then he swam round and round, ducking in and out of the bars of
the moonlight like the frog, his namesake.
By this time Hathi and his three sons had turned, each to one
point of the compass, and were striding silently down the
valleys a mile away. They went on and on for two days' march--
that is to say, a long sixty miles--through the Jungle; and
every step they took, and every wave of their trunks, was known
and noted and talked over by Mang and Chil and the Monkey People
and all the birds. Then they began to feed, and fed quietly for
a week or so. Hathi and his sons are like Kaa, the Rock Python.
The Second Jungle Book |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Rinkitink In Oz by L. Frank Baum: little girl lifted it easily and cast it aside,
although six ordinary men could scarcely have moved it.
The child was somewhat worried at this evidence of a
strength she had heretofore been ignorant that she
possessed. In order to satisfy herself that it was no
delusion, she tested her new-found power in many ways,
finding that nothing was too big nor too heavy for her
to lift. And, naturally enough, the girl gained courage
from these experiments and became confident that she
could protect herself in any emergency. When,
presently, a wild boar ran toward her, grunting
Rinkitink In Oz |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak
not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds
of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy
prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not
of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of
unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them
he is conversing with us. And Tynnichus the Chalcidian affords a striking
instance of what I am saying: he wrote nothing that any one would care to
remember but the famous paean which is in every one's mouth, one of the
finest poems ever written, simply an invention of the Muses, as he himself
says. For in this way the God would seem to indicate to us and not allow
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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 Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: which apparently had no cause at all, except to get Graumann to the
house, to get him to the house in a way that he should be seen
coming, but should not be seen going away. What does this mean?
"Graumann was the only person against whom Siders had an active
cause of quarrel for the moment. There was one other man whom he
hated, and this other man was the prosecuting attorney who would
conduct any case of murder that came up in the town of G-.
"Now John Siders is found murdered - is found killed, in his
lodgings, the morning after he has arranged things so that his
antagonist, his rival in love, Albert Graumann, shall come under
suspicion of having murdered him..
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