| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: the ground. At sight of this, Pierre Dorion eagerly cried out to
the party not to fire, as this movement was a peaceful signal,
and an invitation to a parley. Immediately about a dozen of the
principal warriors, separating from the rest, descended to the
edge of the river, lighted a fire, seated themselves in a
semicircle round it, and, displaying the calumet, invited the
party to land. Mr. Hunt now called a council of the partners on
board of his boat. The question was, whether to trust to the
amicable overtures of these ferocious people? It was determined
in the affirmative; for, otherwise, there was no alternative but
to fight them. The main body of the party were ordered to remain
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Riverman by Stewart Edward White: ran down all one side of the room. Dozens of little tables occupied
the floor. "Pretty waiter-girls" were prepared to serve drinks at
these latter--and to share in them, at a commission. The second
floor was a theatre, and the third a dance-hall. Beneath the
building were still viler depths. From this basement the riverman
and the shanty boy generally graduated penniless, and perhaps
unconscious, to the street. Now, your lumber-jack did not
customarily arrive at this stage without more or less lively doings
en route; therefore McNeill's maintained a force of fighters. They
were burly, sodden men, in striking contrast to the clean-cut,
clear-eyed rivermen, but strong in their experience and their
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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 Walking by Henry David Thoreau: of them, says that "the species of large trees are much more
numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States
there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed
thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain
this size." Later botanists more than confirm his observations.
Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a
tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection
in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic
wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described.
The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther--farther
than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says: "As the
Walking |
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 Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: "Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving.
None of us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get
the way of it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels
damnable. Your ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt
yourself yawning or sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten
times worse. And a pain over the eyebrows here--splitting--and a
feeling like influenza in the head. And it isn't all heaven in your
lungs and things. And going down feels like the beginning of a lift,
only it keeps on. And you can't turn your head to see what's above you,
and you can't get a fair squint at what's happening to your feet
without bending down something painful. And being deep it was dark,
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