| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: imaged to serve as an abiding place for the fierce chaotic spirit of
the African wilderness.
I sat there for some time hugging my knees, waiting for the men
to come. The tremendous landscape seemed to have been willed to
immobility. The rain squalls forty miles or more away did not
appear to shift their shadows; the rare slanting bands of light
from the clouds were as constant as though they were falling
through cathedral windows. But nearer at hand other things were
forward. The birds, thousands of them, were doing their best to
cheer things up. The roucoulements of doves rose from the bushes
down the face of the cliffs; the bell bird uttered his clear
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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 Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: that it might not hinder his stride. His hunter's boots were
crusted with snow. Drops of ice sparkled like jewels along
the thongs that bound his legs. There were no other ornaments
of his dress except the bishop's cross hanging on his breast,
and the silver clasp that fastened his cloak about his neck.
He carried a strong, tall staff in his hand, fashioned at the
top into the form of a cross.
Close beside him, keeping step like a familiar comrade,
was the young Prince Gregor. Long marches through the
wilderness had stretched his legs and broadened his back, and
made a man of him in stature as well as in spirit. His
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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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: wont) have poured out to him some wild confidence about the
Netherlands, to have even heard which would be a crime in Philip's
eyes. And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was, as I just
said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to which
Philip's doings, and the air of the Spanish court, must have been
growing ever more and more intolerable. Hundreds of his country
folk, perhaps men and women whom he had known, were being racked,
burnt alive, buried alive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian,
Peter Titelmann, the chief inquisitor. The "day of the MAUBRULEZ,"
and the wholesale massacre which followed it, had happened but two
years before; and, by all the signs of the times, these murders and
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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 Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: distance within cry of our affections. The little child who
looks wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in the picture,
is now the veteran Sheriff EMERITIS of Perth. And I hear a
story of a lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh, after
an absence of sixty years: "I could see none of my old
friends," she said, "until I went into the Raeburn Gallery,
and found them all there."
It would be difficult to say whether the collection was
more interesting on the score of unity or diversity. Where
the portraits were all of the same period, almost all of the
same race, and all from the same brush, there could not fail
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