| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: his State, and he photograph the Chief and his arab, the Chief and
his Prime Minister, the Chief in his durbar, palace, gardens,
stables--everything. Presently the Chief goes on a big shoot. He
says he will not have a plain photograph--besides, it is difficult.
He will have a painting, and he will pay.'
'Ah,' I said, 'I begin to see.'
'You see? Then I send this Armour. Look!' Mr. Kauffer continued
with rising excitement, baited apparently by the unfortunate canvas
to which he pointed, 'when Armour go to make that I say you go paint
ze Maharajah of Gridigurh spearing ze wild pig. You see what he
make?'
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling: honest Old Thing. He had worked for his living and he
paid his debts before he left. "I shall give that novice a
gift," said Weland. "A gift that shall do him good the
wide world over and Old England after him. Blow up my
fire, Old Thing, while I get the iron for my last task."
Then he made a sword - a dark-grey, wavy-lined sword -
and I blew the fire while he hammered. By Oak, Ash and
Thorn, I tell you, Weland was a Smith of the Gods! He
cooled that sword in running water twice, and the third
time he cooled it in the evening dew, and he laid it out in
the moonlight and said Runes (that's charms) over it, 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 Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird
has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the
pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life
in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and
cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which
we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-
devouring nightingale we hear no news.
The case of these writers of romance is most obscure. They have
been boys and youths; they have lingered outside the window of the
beloved, who was then most probably writing to some one else; they
have sat before a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere
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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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: throwing the faintest light, at a time when nobody else thought my
opinion, on that or any other subject, of the slightest importance. I
thought it would be friendly to immortalize him, as the silly literary
saying is, much as Shakespear immortalized Mr W. H., as he said he
would, simply by writing about him.
Let me tell the story formally.
Thomas Tyler
Throughout the eighties at least, and probably for some years before,
the British Museum reading room was used daily by a gentleman of such
astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him
could ever thereafter forget him. He was of fair complexion, rather
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