| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: And those glittering chains that o'er blue balmy space
Hang the blessing of darkness, had drawn out of sight
To solace unseen hemispheres, the soft night;
And the dew of the dayspring benignly descended,
And the fair morn to all things new sanction extended,
In the smile of the East. And the lark soaring on,
Lost in light, shook the dawn with a song from the sun.
And the world laugh'd.
It wanted but two rosy hours
From the noon, when they pass'd through the thick passion flowers
Of the little wild garden that dimpled before
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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: deadly use to which their works are put. They find themselves
making the new war as a man might wake out of some drugged
condition to find himself strangling his mother.
So that Mr. Pennell's sketchy and transient human figures seem
altogether right to me. He sees these forges, workshops, cranes
and the like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great
caves or icebergs or the stars. They are a new aspect of the
logic of physical necessity that made all these older things, and
he seizes upon the majesty and beauty of their dimensions with an
entire impartiality. And they are as impartial. Through all
these lithographs runs one present motif, the motif of the
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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 Little Britain by Washington Irving: been seen walking up and down the great waste chambers, on
moonlight nights; and are supposed to be the shades of the
ancient proprietors in their court-dresses.
Little Britain has likewise its sages and great men. One of
the most important of the former is a tall, dry old gentleman, of
the name of Skryme, who keeps a small apothecary's shop. He
has a cadaverous countenance, full of cavities and projections;
with a brown circle round each eye, like a pair of horned
spectacles. He is much thought of by the old women, who
consider him a kind of conjurer, because he has two of three
stuffed alligators hanging up in his shop, and several snakes in
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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 A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: In the next hour I got a couple more, and they went the way of the
first one, down the throats of the detachment. That satisfied the
survivors, and they went away and left us in peace.
"We hadn't any more adventures, though I kept awake all night and
was ready. From midnight on the child got very restless, and out
of her head, and moaned, and said, 'Water, water - thirsty'; and
now and then, 'Kiss me, Soldier'; and sometimes she was in her fort
and giving orders to her garrison; and once she was in Spain, and
thought her mother was with her. People say a horse can't cry; but
they don't know, because we cry inside.
"It was an hour after sunup that I heard the boys coming, and
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