| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: `Take your own time, Annie, take your own time.'
And Annie could have wept for pity of him;
And yet she held him on delayingly
With many a scarce-believable excuse,
Trying his truth and his long-sufferance,
Till half-another year had slipt away.
By this the lazy gossips of the port,
Abhorrent of a calculation crost,
Began to chafe as at a personal wrong.
Some thought that Philip did but trifle with her;
Some that she but held off to draw him on;
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: In adoration, cry aloud and soar
In spirit, high above the supine lands
And the low caves of mortal things, and flee
To the last fields of the universe untrod,
Where is no man, nor any earth, nor sea,
And the contented soul is all alone with God.
STRANGE ARE THE WAYS OF MEN
STRANGE are the ways of men,
And strange the ways of God!
We tread the mazy paths
That all our fathers trod.
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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 Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey: Texan."
"That way my hands are clean," replied Duane.
"You never held up a man, robbed a store for grub, stole a
horse when you needed him bad--never anything like that?"
"Somehow I always kept out of that, just when pressed the
hardest."
"Duane, I'm damn glad!" MacNelly exclaimed, gripping Duane's
hand. "Glad for you mother's sakel But, all the same, in spite
of this, you are a Texas outlaw accountable to the state.
You're perfectly aware that under existing circumstances, if
you fell into the hands of the law, you'd probably hang, at
The Lone Star Ranger |
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 Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: money would tempt to journey thither from a distance. By one of
these persons, in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was
proclaimed far and wide, by dint of handbills and little
pamphlets on dingy paper, that a distinguished gentleman,
Roderick Elliston, Esq., had been relieved of a SNAKE in his
stomach! So here was the monstrous secret, ejected from its
lurking place into public view, in all its horrible deformity.
The mystery was out; but not so the bosom serpent. He, if it were
anything but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living den. The
empiric's cure had been a sham, the effect, it was supposed, of
some stupefying drug which more nearly caused the death of the
Mosses From An Old Manse |
