| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: hills. Thus the world reached these missions by water; while on land,
through the mountains, a road led to them, and also to many more that
were too distant behind the hills for ships to serve--a rough road, long
and lonely, punctuated with church towers and gardens. For the Fathers
gradually so stationed their settlements that the traveler might each
morning ride out from one mission and by evening of a day's fair journey
ride into the next. A lonely, rough, dangerous road, but lovely, too,
with a name like music--El Camino Real. Like music also were the names of
the missions--San Juan Capistrano, San Luis Rey de Francia, San Miguel,
Santa Ynes--their very list is a song.
So there, by-and-by, was our continent, with the locomotive whistling
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the
same high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by
some grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her
most salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave
most consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the
intuitive feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned
impartiality. Circumstances had tragically combined to develop
this instinct into a conscious habit. She had seen more than most
girls of the shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of
want to cramp the noblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune had
overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty delusions
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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 Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: gaps caused by the spasmodic workings of jaws sympathetically
affected, the teeth that seemed to grin defiance at him.
When, like the dove in the deluge, he looked round for any spot on
which his eyes might rest, he saw nothing but rows of impatient faces.
Their owners clearly were waiting for him to make an end; they had
come together to discuss questions of practical interest. With the
exceptions of Laure de Rastignac, the Bishop, and two or three of the
young men, they one and all looked bored. As a matter of fact, those
who understand poetry strive to develop the germs of another poetry,
quickened within them by the poet's poetry; but this glacial audience,
so far from attaining to the spirit of the poet, did not even listen
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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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: perpetually endeavored to avoid fighting with him, as to fight with
others. When they made an end of speaking, the accuser's hope to obtain
judgment so far deceived him, that Marcellus was not only absolved, but
the fifth time created consul.
No sooner had he entered upon this consulate, but he suppressed a great
commotion in Etruria, that had proceeded near to revolt, and visited and
quieted the cities. Then, when the dedication of the temple, which he had
vowed out of his Sicilian spoils to Honor and Virtue, was objected to by
the priests, because they denied that one temple could be lawfully
dedicated to two gods, he began to adjoin another to it, resenting the
priests' opposition, and almost converting the thing into an omen. And,
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