| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: neighbourhood and to many of my friends, I feared some prejudice
might be entertained by the first occupant of the Tapestried
Chamber, which might tend to revive the evil report which it had
laboured under, and so disappoint my purpose of rendering it a
useful part or the house. I must confess, my dear Browne, that
your arrival yesterday, agreeable to me for a thousand reasons
besides, seemed the most favourable opportunity of removing the
unpleasant rumours which attached to the room, since your courage
was indubitable, and your mind free of any preoccupation on the
subject. I could not, therefore, have chosen a more fitting
subject for my experiment."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: certainly made him come, travelling-hammock, ear clips and all--
and I am not above confessing that I wish that Herbert Spencer
was alive--for this purpose. I found Udine warm and gay with
memories of Mr. Belloc, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Sidney Low, Colonel
Repington and Dr. Conan Doyle, and anticipating the arrival of
Mr. Harold Cox. So we pass, mostly in automobiles that bump
tremendously over war roads, a cloud of witnesses each testifying
after his manner. Whatever else has happened, we have all been
photographed with invincible patience and resolution under the
direction of Colonel Barberich in a sunny little court in Udine.
My own manner of testifying must be to tell what I have seen and
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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 The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: Now the moment was shattered, and the power to rebuild it failed
him. He had never before thought about putting together broken
bits: he felt like a man whose house has been wrecked by an
earthquake, and who, for lack of skilled labour, is called upon
for the first time to wield a trowel and carry bricks. He
simply did not know how.
Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree
oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and
laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet
definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties
instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on
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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 Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: condition of the people of the free States. In the country from which I came,
a white man holding no slaves was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man,
and men of this class were contemptuously called "poor white trash."
Hence I supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were ignorant,
poor, and degraded as a class, the non-slave-holders at the North must be
in a similar condition. I could have landed in no part of the United States
where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast,
not only to life generally in the South, but in the condition of the colored
people there, than in New Bedford. I was amazed when Mr. Johnson told me
that there was nothing in the laws or constitution of Massachusetts
that would prevent a colored man from being governor of the State,
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