| 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: animation when he got into my king row, would have made a sheep-dog
sick with mortification. Him that was once satisfied only when he was
pegging six boards at keno or giving the faro dealers nervous
prostration--to see him pushing them checkers about like Sally Louisa
at a school-children's party--why, I was all smothered up with
mortification.
"And I sits there playing the black men, all sweating for fear
somebody I knew would find it out. And I thinks to myself some about
this marrying business, and how it seems to be the same kind of a game
as that Mrs. Delilah played. She give her old man a hair cut, and
everybody knows what a man's head looks like after a woman cuts his
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Master of all fowls with feathers,
Screamed and hurtled through the heavens.
Soon he reached the fiery serpents,
The Kenabeek, the great serpents,
Lying huge upon the water,
Sparkling, rippling in the water,
Lying coiled across the passage,
With their blazing crests uplifted,
Breathing fiery fogs and vapors,
So that none could pass beyond them.
But the fearless Hiawatha
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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 The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: force, and turn him out from his ancient station among the divines,
where he had peaceably dwelt near eight hundred years. The attempt
succeeded, and the two usurpers have reigned ever since in his
stead; but, to maintain quiet for the future, it was decreed that
all polemics of the larger size should be hold fast with a chain.
By this expedient, the public peace of libraries might certainly
have been preserved if a new species of controversial books had not
arisen of late years, instinct with a more malignant spirit, from
the war above mentioned between the learned about the higher summit
of Parnassus.
When these books were first admitted into the public libraries, I
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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 Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: another, into notice; and thus something like a true, general
impression of the subject may at last be struck. But in the
short study, the writer, having seized his "point of view,"
must keep his eye steadily to that. He seeks, perhaps,
rather to differentiate than truly to characterise. The
proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the
proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the
shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, continually
forced, may degenerate at length into a grimace; and we have
at best something of a caricature, at worst a calumny.
Hence, if they be readable at all, and hang together by their
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