| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: distant. It took thirty-six years for its light to reach us. With an
eighteen-foot telescope you can see forty-three millions of 'em,
including them of the thirteenth magnitude, which, if one was to go
out now, you would keep on seeing it for twenty-seven hundred years."
"My!" says Mrs. Sampson. "I never knew that before. How warm it is!
I'm as damp as I can be from dancing so much."
"That's easy to account for," says I, "when you happen to know that
you've got two million sweat-glands working all at once. If every one
of your perspiratory ducts, which are a quarter of an inch long, was
placed end to end, they would reach a distance of seven miles."
"Lawsy!" says Mrs. Sampson. "It sounds like an irrigation ditch you
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: greatest pleasure of the greatest number. Ideas of utility, like those of
duty and right, may be pushed to unpleasant consequences. Nor can Plato in
the Gorgias be deemed purely self-regarding, considering that Socrates
expressly mentions the duty of imparting the truth when discovered to
others. Nor must we forget that the side of ethics which regards others is
by the ancients merged in politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well
as in the Stoics, the social principle, though taking another form, is
really far more prominent than in most modern treatises on ethics.
The idealizing of suffering is one of the conceptions which have exercised
the greatest influence on mankind. Into the theological import of this, or
into the consideration of the errors to which the idea may have given rise,
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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 Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: business, patching up doors and windows, making beds and
seats, and getting our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and
his sister made their appearance together, she for
neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he was
working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget
how much a day. The way that he set about cutting wood was
characteristic. We were at that moment patching up and
unpacking in the kitchen. Down he sat on one side, and down
sat his sister on the other. Both were chewing pine-tree
gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple
pleasure with profuse expectoration. She rattled away,
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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 Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: seem to breathe at all. Castanier looked, and saw that the door at the
end of the passage was wide open; the stranger must have entered by
that way.
For the first time in his life the old soldier felt a sensation of
dread that made him stare open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the man before
him; and for that matter, the appearance of the apparition was
sufficiently alarming even if unaccompanied by the mysterious
circumstances of so sudden an entry. The rounded forehead, the harsh
coloring of the long oval face, indicated quite as plainly as the cut
of his clothes that the man was an Englishman, reeking of his native
isles. You had only to look at the collar of his overcoat, at the
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