| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: It is the last, and cunningest, resort
Of one who has found this world of dust and flesh,--
This world of lamentations, death, injustice,
Sickness, humiliation, slow defeat,
Bareness, and ugliness, and iteration,--
Too meaningless; or, if it has a meaning,
Too tiresomely insistent on one meaning:
Futility . . . This world, I hear you saying,--
With lifted chin, and arm in outflung gesture,
Coldly imperious,--this transient world,
What has it then to give, if not containing
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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 Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln: on the walls, but that afternoon, with one eye on the clock and the
other on her embroidery, she sat waiting in growing impatience for
the interruption she anticipated.
The hands of the clock had passed the hour of five before the buzz
of a distant bell brought her to her feet. Hurrying to the window
she peeped between the curtains in time to see a stylish roadster
electric glide down the driveway leading from the McIntyre residence
and stop at the curb. As she turned to go back to her chair Dr.
Stone was ushered into the library by the footman. Mrs. Brewster
welcomed her cousin with frank relief.
"I have waited so impatiently for you," she confessed, making room
The Red Seal |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: stagger under them, and are hurt by a pang that shoots through our chest.
While we eat our dinner we carry on baskets full of earth, as though the
devil drove us. The Kaffer servants have a story that at night a witch and
two white oxen come to help us. No wall, they say, could grow so quickly
under one man's hands.
At night, alone in our cabin, we sit no more brooding over the fire. What
should we think of now? All is emptiness. So we take the old arithmetic;
and the multiplication table, which with so much pains we learnt long ago
and forgot directly, we learn now in a few hours, and never forget again.
We take a strange satisfaction in working arithmetical problems. We pause
in our building to cover the stones with figures and calculations. We save
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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 Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War by Frederick A. Talbot: prepared without delay. The picture recorded by the eye has to
be set down clearly and intelligibly with the utmost speed. The
requisite indications must be made accurately upon the map.
Nothing of importance must be omitted: the most trivial detail is
often of vital importance.
A facile pencil is of inestimable value in such operations.
While aloft the observer does not trust to his memory or his eye
picture, but commits the essential factors to paper in the form
of a code, or what may perhaps be described more accurately as a
shorthand pictorial interpretation of the things he has
witnessed. To the man in the street such a record would be
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