| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: "hooraw" over it if the county judge put her in jail a year for it.
She gave her turbaned head a toss and said, "When dat verdic' comes,
I's gwine to lif' dat ROOF, now, I TELL you."
Pembroke Howard briefly sketched the state's case.
He said he would show by a chain of circumstantial evidence without
break or fault in it anywhere, that the principal prisoner at the bar
committed the murder; that the motive was partly revenge,
and partly a desire to take his own life out of jeopardy, and that
his brother, by his presence, was a consenting accessory to the crime;
a crime which was the basest known to the calendar of
human misdeeds--assassination; that it was conceived by the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: And when a young man comes to a certain stage of intellectual
growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic at
once amusing and fortifying to the mind.
Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having
passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good
places to pass through, and I am none the less at my
destination. All my old opinions were only stages on the way
to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to
something else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot
Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a
sucking infant. Doubtless the world is quite right in a
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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 House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: And the poet trembled, and said,
'Lo-san, will you stay forever?'--'Yes, I will stay.'--
'But what when I am dead?'
'When you are dead your spirit will find my spirit,
And then we shall die no more.'
Music came down upon them, and spring returning,
They remembered worlds before,
And years went over the earth, and over the sea,
And lovers were born and spoke and died,
But forever in sunlight went these two immortal,
Tokkei and the quiet bride . . .
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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 The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: grilles of wood and bronze forming on the outside a couple of
embrasures on either hand the entrance in which stand the guardian
Nio, two colossal demons, Gog and Magog. Instead of capitals ,a
frieze bristling with Chinese lions protects the top of the pillars.
Above this in place of entablature rises tier upon tier of decoration,
each tier projecting beyond the one beneath, and the topmost of all
terminating in a balcony which encircles the whole second story.
The parapet of this balcony is one mass of ornament, and its cornice
another row of lions, brown instead of white. The second story is
no less crowded with carving. Twelve pillars make its ribs, the
spaces between being filled with elaborate woodwork, while on top
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