| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: she had not come straight up to him. He now began to manifest
his indignation in a series of racking howls, and Susy, shaken
out of her trance, dropped her cloak and umbrella and hurried
up.
"Oh, that child!" she groaned.
Under the Fulmer roof there was little time or space for the
indulgence of private sorrows. From morning till night there
was always some immediate practical demand on one's attention;
and Susy was beginning to see how, in contracted households,
children may play a part less romantic but not less useful than
that assigned to them in fiction, through the mere fact of
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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 Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle: and see that thou bringest someone to eat with us this evening.
Meantime we will prepare a grand feast to do whosoever may come
the greater honor. And stay, good Stutely. I would have thee
take Will Scarlet with thee, for it is meet that he should become
acquaint with the ways of the forest."
"Now do I thank thee, good master," quoth Stutely, springing to his feet,
"that thou hast chosen me for this adventure. Truly, my limbs
do grow slack through abiding idly here. As for two of my six,
I will choose Midge the Miller and Arthur a Bland, for, as well
thou knowest, good master, they are stout fists at the quarterstaff.
Is it not so, Little John?"
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: that he realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the
Christian ideal is a true thing.
And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the
imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He
endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and
would not repel its violence by any violence of his own. He had,
as I said before, no scheme for the reconstruction of society. But
the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty
and the suffering that it entails. It desires to get rid of pain,
and the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to Socialism and to
Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism
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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 Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: between the pretender and the honest man.
The causes of this state of society, which is peculiar to Britain,
must be sought far back in the ages. It would seem that the
distinction between "earl and churl" (the noble and the non-noble
freeman) was crushed out in this island by the two Norman conquests-
-that of the Anglo-Saxon nobility by Sweyn and Canute; and that of
the Anglo-Danish nobility by William and his Frenchmen. Those two
terrible calamities, following each other in the short space of
fifty years, seem to have welded together, by a community of
suffering, all ranks and races, at least south of the Tweed; and
when the English rose after the storm, they rose as one homogeneous
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