| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: great glass eyes and the great refulgent cars held them in timidity and
fascination, and the poor lifeless white body of General, stretched
beside the way, heightened the hypnotic mystery; one or two of the
boldest had touched him, and found no outward injury upon him; and this
had sent their eyes back to the automobile with increased awe. Eliza La
Heu summoned one of the onlookers, an old negro; at some word she said to
him he hurried back and returned, leading his horse and empty cart, and
General was lifted into this. The girl took her seat beside the old
driver.
"No," she said to John Mayrant, "certainly not."
I wondered at the needless severity with which she declined his offer to
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Moran of the Lady Letty by Frank Norris: have reemarked as how you had brains. I kin fool the coolies, but
I can't fool you. It looks to me as if that bark yonder was a
derelict; an' do you know what that means to us? Chaw on it a
turn."
"A derelict?"
"If there's a crew on board they're concealed from the public
gaze--an' where are the boats then? I figger she's an abandoned
derelict. Do you know what that means for us--for you and I? It
means," and gripping Wilbur by the shoulders, he spoke the word
into his face with a savage intensity. "It means salvage, do you
savvy?--salvage, salvage. Do you figger what salvage on a seven-
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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 Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: 'life beautiful.' The art we want is the art based on all the
inventions of modern civilisation, and to suit all the needs of
nineteenth-century life.
Do you think, for instance, that we object to machinery? I tell
you we reverence it; we reverence it when it does its proper work,
when it relieves man from ignoble and soulless labour, not when it
seeks to do that which is valuable only when wrought by the hands
and hearts of men. Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it
is all bad and worthless and ugly. And let us not mistake the
means of civilisation for the end of civilisation; steam-engine,
telephone and the like, are all wonderful, but remember that their
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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 Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: only demolished a foolish, happy conceit, but it wounded. It
touched Jessie grossly.
She did not hear it, he concluded from her subsequent bearing;
but during the supper they had in the little private dining-room,
though she talked cheerfully, he was preoccupied. Whiffs of
indistinct conversation, and now and then laughter, came in from
the inn parloiir through the pelargoniums in the open window.
Hoopdriver felt it must all be in the same strain,--at her
expense and his. He answered her abstractedly. She was tired, she
said, and presently went to her room. Mr. Hoopdriver, in his
courtly way, opened the door for her and bowed her out. He stood
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