| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: For him the oven smoke as for a speechless beast,
And the sire of my Taheia come greedy to the feast."
"Rua, be silent, spare me. Taheia closes her ears.
Pity my yearning heart, pity my girlish years!
Flee from the cruel hands, flee from the knife and coal,
Lie hid in the deeps of the woods, Rua, sire of my soul!"
"Whither to flee, Taheia, whither in all of the land?
The fires of the bloody kitchen are kindled on every hand;
On every hand in the isle a hungry whetting of teeth,
Eyes in the trees above, arms in the brush beneath.
Patience to lie in wait, cunning to follow the sleuth,
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Whirligigs by O. Henry: used to do in debate, he enunciated the spirit of that
Ruling that subsequently drove the land-sharks to the
wall, and placed the seal of peace and security over the
doors of ten thousand homes.
"And, furthermore," he continued, with a clear, soft
light upon his face, "it may interest you to know that from
this time on this office will consider that when a survey
of land made by virtue of a certificate granted by this
state to the men who wrested it from the wilderness and
the savage -- made in good faith, settled in good faith,
and left in good faith to their children or innocent pur-
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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 Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: from the magnetic axis, and found that the rarefaction, or the
condensation of the gas in either of the bulbs had not the slightest
influence. When the magnetic force was developed, the bulbs
remained in their first position, even when one was filled with
nitrogen, and the other as far as possible exhausted. Nitrogen,
in fact, acted 'like space itself'; it was neither magnetic nor
diamagnetic.
He cannot conveniently compare the paramagnetic force of oxygen with
iron, in consequence of the exceeding magnetic intensity of the
latter substance; but he does compare it with the sulphate of iron,
and finds that, bulk for bulk, oxygen is equally magnetic with 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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: later, some storm must have carried a Greenland viking to San
Domingo or to Cuba; and then, as has been well said, some
Scandinavian dynasty might have sat upon the throne of Mexico.
These stories are well known to antiquarians. They may be found,
almost all of them, in Professor Rafn's "Antiquitates Americanae."
The action in them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the
internal evidence of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, who,
when he saw what seems to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton
at the south-east end of Boston Bay, said, "Here should I like to
dwell," and, shot by an Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that
place, with a cross at his head and a cross at his feet, and call
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