| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Caesar's Commentaries in Latin by Julius Caesar: Aquitania Cantabrisque convenisse constabat, vix quarta parte relicta,
multa nocte se in castra recepit.
Hac audita pugna maxima pars Aquitaniae sese Crasso dedidit obsidesque
ultro misit; quo in numero fuerunt Tarbelli, Bigerriones, Ptianii,
Vocates, Tarusates, Elusates, Gates, Ausci, Garumni, Sibusates, Cocosates:
paucae ultimae nationes anni tempore confisae, quod hiems suberat, id
facere neglexerunt.
Eodem fere tempore Caesar, etsi pmpe exacta iam aestas erat, tamen,
quod omni Gallia pacata Morini Menapiique supererant, qui in armis essent
neque ad eum umquam legatos de pace misissent, arbitratus id bellum
celeriter confici posse eo exercitum duxit; qui longe alia ratione ac
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: to burn wheat-ricks, nor poison pheasants, but was simply "sugaring
the trees for moths," as a blameless entomologist? And when, in
self-justification, he took you to his house in Islington, and
showed you the glazed and corked drawers full of delicate insects,
which had evidently cost him in the collecting the spare hours of
many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of his small salary,
were you not a little puzzled to make out what spell there could be
in those "useless" moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty miles
down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into the damp forest like a
deer-stealer, a sober white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your
very best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which
are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we
express to ourselves the processes of our own brain? May not his
Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as
nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that
that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived
of as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and
has to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and
wrong, love and hate, and all which, in the common instincts of men,
involves a free will, a free judgment, a free responsibility and desert?
And that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Daemonic Element, an
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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 Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: through a pleasant blur of tears, which made the
broad, rounded shoulders and the halting columns of
legs dance. This David Anderson had almost for-
gotten that there was unpaid kindness in the whole
world, and it seemed to him as if he had seen angels
walking up and down. He sat for a while doing
nothing except realizing happiness of the present
and of the future. He gazed at the green spread
of forest boughs, and saw in pleased anticipation
their red and gold tints of autumn; also in pleased
anticipation their snowy and icy mail of winter,
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