| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: fresh-fallen snow there lay the ice of the night before. He walked
carefully, watching for the slippery places.
He had been walking about half an hour, perhaps, when he came to a
cross street. Here he noticed the tracks of a wagon, the trace
still quite fresh, as the slowly falling flakes did not yet cover it.
The tracks led out towards the north, out on to the hilly, open
fields.
Amster was somewhat astonished. It was very seldom that a carriage
came into this neighbourhood, and yet these narrow wheel-tracks
could have been made only by an equipage of that character. The
heavy trucks which passed these roads occasionally had much wider
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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 Intentions by Oscar Wilde: mischievous. One night at C-'s, the above dramatic partners were
the temporary subject of chat. Mr. X. commended the passion and
haughty style of a tragedy (I don't know which of them), but was
instantly taken up by Elia, who told him 'THAT was nothing; the
lyrics were the high things - the lyrics!'
One side of his literary career deserves especial notice. Modern
journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man
of the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiatic
prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous
exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the
subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much
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