| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: German brain, and to which we chiefly owe our victory and temporary
respite from the fangs of the wolf, Mathias Erzberger posted his letter.
It went wrong in the mails. If you desire to read the whole of it, the
International News Bureau can either furnish it or put you on the track
of it. One sentence from it shall be quoted here:
"We will undertake the restoration of Russia, and in possession of such
support will be ready, within ten or fifteen years, to bring France,
without any difficulty, into our power. The march towards Paris will be
easier than in 1914. The last step but one towards the world dominion
will then be reached. The continent is ours. Afterwards will follow the
last stage, the closing struggle, between the continent and the over-
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: Spaniard and the noble virtue of his wife. She came to them at a time
when her proposal seemed that of a liberating angel. The fortune and
honor of the merchant, momentarily compromised, required a prompt and
secret succor. La Marana made over to the husband the whole sum she
had obtained of the father for Juana's "dot," requiring neither
acknowledgment nor interest. According to her own code of honor, a
contract, a trust, was a thing of the heart, and God its supreme
judge. After stating the miseries of her position to Dona Lagounia,
she confided her daughter and her daughter's fortune to the fine old
Spanish honor, pure and spotless, which filled the precincts of that
ancient house. Dona Lagounia had no child, and she was only too happy
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: their paddles deep into the wave, apparently catch the water and
force it under the canoe, and by this action not merely regain
III an equilibrium, but give their bark a vigorous impulse
forward.
The effect of different modes of life upon the human frame and
human character is strikingly instanced in the contrast between
the hunting Indians of the prairies, and the piscatory Indians of
the sea-coast. The former, continually on horseback scouring the
plains, gaining their food by hardy exercise, and subsisting
chiefly on flesh, are generally tall, sinewy, meagre, but well
formed, and of bold and fierce deportment: the latter, lounging
|
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 Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: raced to keep up, spreading the alarm and rousing reinforcements as
they went. Presently a man on horse-back made his appearance on
the opposite beach of Fangalii. Klein and the natives distinctly
saw him signal with a lantern; which is the more strange, as the
horseman (Captain Hufnagel, plantation manager of Vailele) had
never a lantern to signal with. The praam kept in. Many men in
white were seen to stand up, step overboard, and wade to shore. At
the same time the eye of panic descried a breastwork of "foreign
stone" (brick) upon the beach. Samoans are prepared to-day to
swear to its existence, I believe conscientiously, although no such
thing was ever made or ever intended in that place. The hour is
|
