| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: a sultry afternoon, when it had rained, and the drops fell on us from the
leaves of the acacia trees. The flowers were damp; they made mildew marks
on the paper I folded them in. After many years I threw them away. There
is nothing of them left in the box now, but a faint, strong smell of dried
acacia, that recalls that sultry summer afternoon; but the rose is in the
box still.
It is many years ago now; I was a girl of fifteen, and I went to visit in a
small up-country town. It was young in those days, and two days' journey
from the nearest village; the population consisted mainly of men. A few
were married, and had their wives and children, but most were single.
There was only one young girl there when I came. She was about seventeen,
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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 Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: freedom, and who made great truths so familiar by his simple
utterance of them. Angels, as had been so often said, seemed to
have wrought with him at his labor in the fields; angels seemed
to have sat with him by the fireside; and, dwelling with angels
as friend with friends, he had imbibed the sublimity of their
ideas, and imbued it with the sweet and lowly charm of household
words. So thought the poet. And Ernest, on the other hand, was
moved and agitated by the living images which the poet flung out
of his mind, and which peopled all the air about the cottage-door
with shapes of beauty, both gay and pensive. The sympathies of
these two men instructed them with a profounder sense than either
The Snow Image |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War by Frederick A. Talbot: airman.
Advancing troops also are now urged to move forward under the
shelter of trees, even if the task entails marching in single or
double file, to escape the prying eyes of the man above. By
keeping close to the line of trunks, thus taking full advantage
of the overhanging branches, and marching in such a manner as to
create little dust, it is possible to escape the aerial scout.
The concealment of cavalry, however, is somewhat difficult. An
animal, especially if he be unaccustomed to the noise of the
aeroplane, is likely to become startled, and to give vent to a
frightened and vociferous neighing which invariably provokes a
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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 Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes, and so he used to stare
for fun. At other times he would pick the long thorns out of the
pads of his friends, for wolves suffer terribly from thorns and
burs in their coats. He would go down the hillside into the
cultivated lands by night, and look very curiously at the
villagers in their huts, but he had a mistrust of men because
Bagheera showed him a square box with a drop gate so cunningly
hidden in the jungle that he nearly walked into it, and told him
that it was a trap. He loved better than anything else to go with
Bagheera into the dark warm heart of the forest, to sleep all
through the drowsy day, and at night see how Bagheera did his
The Jungle Book |
