| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: terraces of yellow limestone full of vines and fruit-trees;
through the oak-groves of Carine and the dark Gates of Zagros,
walled in by precipices; into the ancient city of Chala, where
the people of Samaria had been kept in captivity long ago; and
out again by the mighty portal, riven through the encircling
hills, where he saw the image of the High Priest of the Magi
sculptured on the wall of rock, with hand uplifted as if to bless
the centuries of pilgrims; past the entrance of the narrow
defile, filled from end to end with orchards of peaches and figs,
through which the river Gyndes foamed down to meet him; over
the broad rice-fields, where the autumnal vapours spread their
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: the richest persons in the town: the poor lad had therefore been led
to love her by desires for material happiness, by the hope, long
indulged, of gilding with comfort his mother's last years, by eager
longing for the ease of life so needful to men who live by thought;
but this most innocent point of departure degraded his passion in his
own eyes. Moreover, he feared the ridicule the world would cast upon
the love of a young man of twenty-three for an old maid of forty.
And yet his passion was real; whatever may seem false about such a
love elsewhere, it can be realized as a fact in the provinces, where,
manners and morals being without change or chance or movement or
mystery, marriage becomes a necessity of life. No family will accept a
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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 Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: that, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately
left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,
Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the
dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he
has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the
vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them
before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions
have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.
One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a
mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three
hundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says that they have gone
Long Odds |
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 Barlaam and Ioasaph by St. John of Damascus: full estate of matrimony, yet, sith this is contrary to thy mind,
I will never constrain thee again, but will do everything that
liketh thee. For the rest, do not thou utterly abhor me; but
hearken to me for the nonce, and thou shalt deliver me from
superstitious error, and thou shalt do whatever seemeth thee good
hereafter all the days of thy life."
Thus spake she; for indeed she had, for her adviser, one to whom
she lent a privy ear, and the pirate was well versed in
Scripture, being verily the creator and teacher of iniquity.
Thus then she spake with fawning words entangling him, right and
left, around with her toils and meshes, and she began to shake
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