| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: other runs dry.
And now we turn to Nature. All these years we have lived beside her, and
we have never seen her; and now we open our eyes and look at her.
The rocks have been to us a blur of brown: we bend over them, and the
disorganised masses dissolve into a many-coloured, many-shaped, carefully-
arranged form of existence. Here masses of rainbow-tinted crystals, half-
fused together; there bands of smooth grey and red methodically overlying
each other. This rock here is covered with a delicate silver tracery, in
some mineral, resembling leaves and branches; there on the flat stone, on
which we so often have sat to weep and pray, we look down, and see it
covered with the fossil footprints of great birds, and the beautiful
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: Francis, the terror of counter-revolutionaries and criminals
alike, is a very bad speaker. He looks into the air over the
heads of his audience and talks as if he were not addressing
them at all but some one else unseen. He talks even of a
subject which he knows perfectly with curious inability to
form his sentences; stops, changes words, and often,
recognizing that he cannot finish his sentence, ends where
he is, in the middle of it, with a little odd, deprecating
emphasis, as if to say: "At this point there is a full stop. At
least so it seems."
He gave a short colourless sketch of the history of the
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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 Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: Thou see'st our mistress' ornaments are chaste.
But all these poor forbiddings could not stay him;
He in the worst sense construes their denial:
The doors, the wind, the glove that did delay him,
He takes for accidental things of trial;
Or as those bars which stop the hourly dial,
Who with a lingering stay his course doth let,
Till every minute pays the hour his debt.
'So, so,' quoth he, 'these lets attend the time,
Like little frosts that sometime threat the spring.
To add a more rejoicing to the prime,
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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: poetry tracing its descent, through King James I., from
Chaucer. The dialect alone accounts for much; for it was
then written colloquially, which kept it fresh and supple;
and, although not shaped for heroic flights, it was a direct
and vivid medium for all that had to do with social life.
Hence, whenever Scotch poets left their laborious imitations
of bad English verses, and fell back on their own dialect,
their style would kindle, and they would write of their
convivial and somewhat gross existences with pith and point.
In Ramsay, and far more in the poor lad Fergusson, there was
mettle, humour, literary courage, and a power of saying what
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