| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: understood it. He returned to his flagship. What he saw next morning was
the British cruiser in a new place, interposed between Dewey and himself.
Once more, he understood; and he and his squadron sailed off; and it was
soon after this incident that the disappointed Kaiser wrote that, if only
his fleet had been larger, he would have taken us by the scruff of the
neck.
Tell these things to the next man you hear talking about George III or
the Alabama. You may meet him in front of a bulletin board, or in a
drawing-room. He is amongst us everywhere, in the street and in the
house. He may be a paid propagandist or merely a silly ignorant puppet.
But whatever he is, he will not find much to say in response, unless it
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs: even if Buckingham gets me, but you must go at once. Do not
wait until it is too late. The lions have had no offering
for a long time, and Buckingham would seize upon the first
stranger as a gift to them."
I did not perfectly understand what she meant, and was about
to ask her when a heavy body leaped upon me from behind, and
great arms encircled my neck. I struggled to free myself
and turn upon my antagonist, but in another instant I was
overwhelmed by a half dozen powerful, half-naked men, while
a score of others surrounded me, a couple of whom seized the
girl.
Lost Continent |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: moment of detachment from mere visual impressions gave me a thrill
very much approaching a shudder. I seemed to understand that, with
the shock of the agonies and perplexities of his trial, the
imagination of that man, whose moods, notions and motives wore
frequently an air of grotesque mystery--that his imagination had
been at last roused into activity. And this was awful. Just try to
enter into the feelings of a man whose imagination wakes up at the
very moment he is about to enter the tomb . . . "
"You must not think," went on Marlow after a pause, "that on that
morning with Fyne I went consciously in my mind over all this, let
us call it information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which
Chance |
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 Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: husband. Englishmen and Scotchmen introduced the new society into
Russia and into Geneva. Sweden and Poland seem to have received it
from France; while, in the South, it seems to have been exclusively
an English plant. Sackville, Duke of Middlesex, is said to have
founded the first lodge at Florence in 1733, Lord Coleraine at
Gibraltar and Madrid, one Gordon in Portugal; and everywhere, at the
commencement of the movement, we find either London or Scotland the
mother-lodges, introducing on the Continent those liberal and humane
ideas of which England was then considered, to her glory, as the
only home left on earth.
But, alas! the seed sown grew up into strange shapes, according to
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