| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: Here one hour you toil and combat, sin and suffer, bleed and die;
In my father's quiet mansion soon to lay your burden by.
Bear a moment, heavy laden, weary hand and weeping eye.
Lo, the feet of your deliverer; lo, the hour of freedom here.
VARIANT FORM OF THE PRECEDING POEM
COME to me, all ye that labour; I will give your spirits rest;
Here apart in starry quiet I will give you rest.
Come to me, ye heavy laden, sin defiled and care opprest,
In your father's quiet mansions, soon to prove a welcome guest.
But an hour you bear your trial, sin and suffer, bleed and die;
But an hour you toil and combat here in day's inspiring eye.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: narrow belt of red-brick desolation, broken windows, gap-toothed
doors, and streets where the grass grows between the crowded
wharves and the bustling city. To the lake front comes wheat
from Chicago, lumber, coal, and ore, and a large trade in cheap
excursionists.
It was my felicity to catch a grain steamer and an elevator
emptying that same steamer. The steamer might have been two
thousand tons burden. She was laden with wheat in bulk; from
stem to stern, thirteen feet deep, lay the clean, red wheat.
There was no twenty-five per cent dirt admixture about it at all.
It was wheat, fit for the grindstones as it lay. They manoeuvred
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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 Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey: your gun. So does mine. But we ve orders to obey."
Many gullies and canyons headed up on the slope of Coconina west of
Silver Cup, and ran down to open wide on the flat desert. They contained
plots of white sage and bunches of rich grass and cold springs. The
steers that ranged these ravines were wild as wolves, and in the tangled
thickets of juniper and manzanita and jumbles of weathered cliff they
were exceedingly difficult to catch.
Well it was that Hare had received his initiation and had become inured
to rough, incessant work, for now he came to know the real stuff of which
these Mormons were made. No obstacle barred them. They penetrated the
gullies to the last step; they rode weathered slopes that were difficult
The Heritage of the Desert |
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 Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: companions till they gained the terrace once more, and found four
or five of the gentlemen, with Sir Richard at their head,
proceeding to the bowling-green.
Lady Grenville, in an agony of fear about the quarrel which she
knew must come, would have gladly whispered five words to her
husband: but she dared not do it before the Spaniard, and dreaded,
too, a faint or a scream from the Rose, whose father was of the
party. So she walked on with her fair prisoner, commanding Cary to
escort them in, and the Spaniard to go to the bowling-green.
Cary obeyed: but he gave her the slip the moment she was inside the
door, and then darted off to the gentlemen.
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