| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: sorrow."
'So spake I, and straightway he answered, and said: "It is
the son of Laertes, whose dwelling is in Ithaca; and I saw
him in an island shedding big tears in the halls of the
nymph Calypso, who holds him there perforce; so he may not
come to his own country, for he has by him no ships with
oars, and no companions to send him on his way over the
broad back of the sea. But thou, Menelaus, son of Zeus, art
not ordained to die and meet thy fate in Argos, the
pasture-land of horses, but the deathless gods will convey
thee to the Elysian plain and the world's end, where is
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Cavalry General by Xenophon: leaders,[13] so that the number of men to whom each petty officer has
to transmit an order will be very few;[14] while the section-leaders
will deploy and increase the front, whatever the formation, without
confusion, whenever there is occasion for the movement.[15]
[11] i.e. "given by general word of command, or in writing." As to the
"word-of-mouth command," see above, S. 3; "Hell." VII. v. 9; and
for the "herald," see "Anab." III. iv. 36.
[12] Reading {pros to dia p.}, or if {pros to} . . . transl. "with a
view to."
[13] Lit. pempadarchs, i.e. No. 6 in the file. See "Cyrop." II. i. 22
foll., iii. 21.
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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 Exiles by Honore de Balzac: thesis admirably argued not long since at the Sorbonne.
The stranger looked down from his raised position on the crowd below
with that deep glance that held a whole poem of sorrow, and those who
met his eye felt an indescribable thrill. The lad, following the old
man, sat down on one of the steps, leaning against the pulpit in a
graceful and melancholy attitude. The silence was now profound, and
the doorway and even the street were blocked by scholars who had
deserted the other classes.
Doctor Sigier was to-day to recapitulate, in the last of a series of
discourses, the views he had set forth in the former lectures on the
Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell. His strange doctrine responded to the
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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 The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: people do when they are thirty; and could play as well as nature
allowed her to, which, as became daily more obvious, was a really
generous allowance. If this one definite gift was surrounded by
dreams and ideas of the most extravagant and foolish description,
no one was any the wiser.
Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out
of the common. She was an only child and had never been bullied and
laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she
was eleven, two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up,
and they lived for the sake of the air in a comfortable house
in Richmond. She was of course brought up with excessive care,
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