| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: natural vehicle of expression to all mankind. Henceforward prose and
poetry formed each other. A comparatively slender link between them was
also furnished by proverbs. We may trace in poetry how the simple
succession of lines, not without monotony, has passed into a complicated
period, and how in prose, rhythm and accent and the order of words and the
balance of clauses, sometimes not without a slight admixture of rhyme, make
up a new kind of harmony, swelling into strains not less majestic than
those of Homer, Virgil, or Dante.
One of the most curious and characteristic features of language, affecting
both syntax and style, is idiom. The meaning of the word 'idiom' is that
which is peculiar, that which is familiar, the word or expression which
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: rose. Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why.
There was something in the dawn's delicate loveliness that seemed
to him inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that
break in beauty, and that set in storm. These rustics, too, with
their rough, good-humoured voices, and their nonchalant ways, what
a strange London they saw! A London free from the sin of night and
the smoke of day, a pallid, ghost-like city, a desolate town of
tombs! He wondered what they thought of it, and whether they knew
anything of its splendour and its shame, of its fierce, fiery-
coloured joys, and its horrible hunger, of all it makes and mars
from morn to eve. Probably it was to them merely a mart where they
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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 Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini: for his undertaking.
That night Richard made free talk of the undertaking to Diana and to
Ruth, loving, as does the pusillanimous, to show himself engaged in
daring enterprises. Emulating his friend Sir Rowland, he held forth
with prolixity upon the great service he was to do the State, and Ruth,
listening to him, was proud of his zeal, the sincerity of which it
never entered her mind to doubt.
Diana listened, too, but without illusions concerning Master Richard,
and she kept her conclusions to herself.
During the afternoon of the morrow, which was Sunday, Sir Rowland
returned to Bridgwater, his mission to Feversham entirely successful,
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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 Master of the World by Jules Verne: Why then the name Great Eyrie? Perhaps the mount might better have
been called a crater, for in the center of those steep and rounded
walls there might well be a huge deep basin. Perhaps there might even
lie within their circuit a mountain lake, such as exists in other
parts of the Appalachian mountain system, a lagoon fed by the rain
and the winter snows.
In brief was not this the site of an ancient volcano, one which had
slept through ages, but whose inner fires might yet reawake? Might
not the Great Eyrie reproduce in its neighborhood the violence of
Mount Krakatoa or the terrible disaster of Mont Pelee? If there were
indeed a central lake, was there not danger that its waters,
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