| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs: spears. These they kept ever pointed toward the beast of
prey, and I learned from snatches of the conversation I
overheard that occasionally there might be a lion who would
brave even the terrors of fire to leap in upon human prey.
It was for such that the spears were always couched.
But nothing of the sort occurred during this hideous death
march, and with the first pale heralding of dawn we reached
our goal--an open place in the midst of a tangled wildwood.
Here rose in crumbling grandeur the first evidences I had
seen of the ancient civilization which once had graced fair
Albion--a single, time-worn arch of masonry.
Lost Continent |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Whirligigs by O. Henry: She's the only white woman in La Paz. The rest
range from a dappled dun to the colour of a b-flat piano
key. She's been here a year. Comes from -- well, you
know how a woman can talk -- ask 'em to say 'string'
and they'll say 'crow's foot' or 'cat's cradle.' Some-
times you'd think she was from Oshkosh, and again from
Jacksonville, Florida, and the next day from Cape Cod."
"Mystery?" ventured Merriam.
"M -- well, she looks it; but her talk's translucent
enough. But that's a woman. I suppose if the Sphinx
were to begin talking she'd merely say: 'Goodness me!
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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 A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: and soul, and would serve God in some other place, which has not
been commanded him. Such perversity no bishop forbids, no
preacher corrects; nay, for covetousness' sake they confirm it
and daily only invent more pilgrimages, elevations of saints,
indulgence-fairs. God have pity on such blindness.
VI. On the other hand, parents cannot earn eternal punishment in
any way more easily than by neglecting their own children in
their own home, and not teaching them the things which have been
spoken of above. Of what help is it, that they kill themselves
with fasting, praying, making pilgrimages, and do all manner of
good works? God will, after all, not ask them about these things
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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 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: bridge, along a wide road raised to the level of a ground floor
above the land, which, not being built upon, harbours puddles,
ponds, pigs, and Irish hovels; - so to the dock warehouses, four
huge piles of building with no windows, surrounded by a wall about
twelve feet high - in through the large gates, round which hang
twenty or thirty rusty Irish, playing pitch and toss and waiting
for employment; - on along the railway, which came in at the same
gates and which branches down between each vast block - past a
pilot-engine butting refractory trucks into their places - on to
the last block, [and] down the branch, sniffing the guano-scented
air and detecting the old bones. The hartshorn flavour of the
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