| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Young Forester by Zane Grey: that was almost worse. By-and-by the air cleared a little. Rifts in the
smoke drifted over me, always toward the far side of the canyon. Twice I
crawled out upon the bank, but the heat drove me back into the water. The
snow-water from the mountain-peaks had changed from cold to warm; still, it
gave a relief from the hot blast of air. More time dragged by. Weary to the
point of collapse, I grew not to care about anything.
Then the yellow fog lightened, and blew across the brook and lifted and
split. The parts of the canyon-slope that I could see were seared and
blackened. The pines were columns of living coals. The fire was eating into
their hearts. Presently they would snap at the trunk, crash down, and burn
to ashes. Wreathes of murky smoke circled them, and drifted aloft to join
The Young Forester |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Fervently she kiss'd her two sons' foreheads,
And her two girls' cheeks with fervour kiss'd she,
But she from the suckling in the cradle
Could not tear herself, so deep her sorrow!
So she's torn thence by her fiery brother,
On his nimble steed he lifts her quickly,
And so hastens, with the heart-sad woman,
Straightway tow'rd his father's lofty dwelling.
Short the time was--seven days had pass'd not,--
Yet enough 'twas; many mighty princes
Sought the woman in her widow's-mourning.
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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 Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: religious conception of the universe seems to many mind-curers
"verified" from day to day by their experience of fact.
"Experience of fact" is a field with so many things in it that
the sectarian scientist methodically declining, as he does, to
recognize such "facts" as mind-curers and others like them
experience, otherwise than by such rude heads of classification
as "bosh," "rot," "folly," certainly leaves out a mass of raw
fact which, save for the industrious interest of the religious in
the more personal aspects of reality, would never have succeeded
in getting itself recorded at all. We know this to be true
already in certain cases; it may, therefore, be true in others as
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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 In the Cage by Henry James: of their recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, exclusively
of innumerable pages of the neatest arithmetic in a very greasy but
most orderly little pocket-book, the distracting possible melted
away--the fleeting absolute ruled the scene. The plans, hour by
hour, were simply superseded, and it was much of a rest to the
girl, as she sat on the pier and overlooked the sea and the
company, to see them evaporate in rosy fumes and to feel that from
moment to moment there was less left to cipher about. The week
proves blissfully fine, and her mother, at their lodgings--partly
to her embarrassment and partly to her relief--struck up with the
landlady an alliance that left the younger couple a great deal of
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