| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: hand that smooths their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the
lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin. It was you
I thought of all the time; I gave to them the love you did not
need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs . . . And you
thought I spent too much of my time in going to Church, and in
Church duties. But where else could I turn? God's house is the
only house where sinners are made welcome, and you were always in
my heart, Gerald, too much in my heart. For, though day after day,
at morn or evensong, I have knelt in God's house, I have never
repented of my sin. How could I repent of my sin when you, my
love, were its fruit! Even now that you are bitter to me I cannot
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: deil's name! Ye cannae desert your brother's son for the fair
shame of it; and if ye did, and it came to be kennt, ye wouldnae
be very popular in your country-side, or I'm the more deceived."
"I'm no just very popular the way it is," returned Ebenezer; "and
I dinnae see how it would come to be kennt. No by me, onyway;
nor yet by you or your friends. So that's idle talk, my buckie,"
says he.
"Then it'll have to be David that tells it," said Alan.
"How that?" says my uncle, sharply."
"Ou, just this, way" says Alan. "My friends would doubtless keep
your nephew as long as there was any likelihood of siller to be
Kidnapped |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: to wait while a black boar clambers sedately over the so-called pig
fence. Nothing can more thoroughly depict the worst side of the
Samoan character than these useless barriers which deface their
only road. It was one of the first orders issued by the government
of Mulinuu after the coming of the chief justice, to have the
passage cleared. It is the disgrace of Mataafa that the thing is
not yet done.
The village of Malie is the scene of prosperity and peace. In a
very good account of a visit there, published in the AUSTRALASIAN,
the writer describes it to be fortified; she must have been
deceived by the appearance of some pig walls on the shore. There
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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 Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: To project imaginatively, for my hero, a relation that has
nothing to do with the matter (the matter of my subject) but has
everything to do with the manner (the manner of my presentation
of the same) and yet to treat it, at close quarters and for fully
economic expression's possible sake, as if it were important and
essential--to do that sort of thing and yet muddle nothing may
easily become, as one goes, a signally attaching proposition;
even though it all remains but part and parcel, I hasten to
recognise, of the merely general and related question of expressional
curiosity and expressional decency.
I am moved to add after so much insistence on the scenic side of
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