| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: 500,000 the fiftieth year; about a million the seventy-fifth year.
Now I am going to be liberal about this thing, and consider that
fifty million whites have died in America from the beginning up to
to-day - make it sixty, if you want to; make it a hundred million -
it's no difference about a few millions one way or t'other. Well,
now, you can see, yourself, that when you come to spread a little
dab of people like that over these hundreds of billions of miles of
American territory here in heaven, it is like scattering a ten-cent
box of homoeopathic pills over the Great Sahara and expecting to
find them again. You can't expect us to amount to anything in
heaven, and we DON'T - now that is the simple fact, and we have got
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White: of construction the days of accomplishment seemed to him lean.
His men did the work and reaped the excitement. Senor Johnson
never thought now of riding the wild horses, of swinging the rope
coiled at his saddle horn, or of rounding ahead of the flying
herds. His inspections were business inspections. The country
was tame. The leather chaps with the silver conchas hung behind
the door. The Colt's forty-five depended at the head of the bed.
Senor Johnson rode in mufti. Of his cowboy days persisted still
the high-heeled boots and spurs, the broad Stetson hat, and the
fringed buckskin gauntlets.
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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 A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: Here is a mill with the humming of thunder,
Here is the weir with the wonder of foam,
Here is the sluice with the race running under--
Marvellous places, though handy to home!
Sounds of the village grow stiller and stiller,
Stiller the note of the birds on the hill;
Dusty and dim are the eyes of the miller,
Deaf are his ears with the moil of the mill.
Years may go by, and the wheel in the river
Wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day,
Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for ever
A Child's Garden of Verses |
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 Aspern Papers by Henry James: with indignation. I did think so but forebore to say it,
and I softly followed my conductress.
I remember that what I said to her as I stood for a moment beside
the old woman's bed was, "Does she never show you her eyes then?
Have you never seen them?" Miss Bordereau had been divested
of her green shade, but (it was not my fortune to behold Juliana
in her nightcap) the upper half of her face was covered by the fall
of a piece of dingy lacelike muslin, a sort of extemporized
hood which, wound round her head, descended to the end of her nose,
leaving nothing visible but her white withered cheeks and
puckered mouth, closed tightly and, as it were consciously.
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