| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: All the time she sang she looked steadfastly before her, her knees
straight, her hands upon her knee, her head cast back and up. The
expression was admirable throughout, for had she not learned it from the
lips and under the criticism of the author? When it was done, she
turned upon Archie a face softly bright, and eyes gently suffused and
shining in the twilight, and his heart rose and went out to her with
boundless pity and sympathy. His question was answered. She was a
human being tuned to a sense of the tragedy of life; there were pathos
and music and a great heart in the girl.
He arose instinctively, she also; for she saw she had gained a point,
and scored the impression deeper, and she had wit enough left to flee
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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 Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: suppressed by a gesture and an imperious glance. But when it came
to the turn of Lawless, there was found under his gown a sheaf of
arrows identical with those that had been shot.
"How say ye now?" asked the tall man, frowningly, of Dick.
"Sir," replied Dick, "I am here in sanctuary, is it not so? Well,
sir, I see by your bearing that ye are high in station, and I read
in your countenance the marks of piety and justice. To you, then,
I will yield me prisoner, and that blithely, foregoing the
advantage of this holy place. But rather than to be yielded into
the discretion of that man - whom I do here accuse with a loud
voice to be the murderer of my natural father and the unjust
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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 Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther: wild beasts to tear us to pieces, or left us to rot in prison or perish
in distress. What else is that but to reproach them as murderers and
bloodhounds? For although you have not actually done all this, you have
nevertheless, so far as you were concerned, suffered him to pine and
perish in misfortune.
It is just as if I saw some one navigating and laboring in deep water
[and struggling against adverse winds] or one fallen into fire, and
could extend to him the hand to pull him out and save him, and yet
refused to do it. What else would I appear, even in the eyes of the
world, than as a murderer and a criminal?
Therefore it is God's ultimate purpose that we suffer harm to befall no
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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 Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is
not even life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far
Eastern mind.
Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by
their very impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and
fettered fancy. All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan
imagination lie latent in the sex with which his forefathers
humanized their words, never stir the Tartar nor the Chinese soul.
They feel the poetry of nature as much as, indeed much more than,
we; but it is a poetry unassociated with man. And this, too,
curiously enough, in spite of the fact that to explain the cosmos
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