| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum: the statue of Unc Nunkie and kissed the marble
face affectionately.
"I did my best, Unc," he said, with a sob, "but
it was no use!"
Then he drew back and looked around the room,
and the sight of the assembled company quite
amazed him.
Aside from the marble statues of Unc Nunkie and
Margolotte, the Glass Cat was there, curled up on
a rug; and the Woozy was there, sitting on its
square hind legs and looking on the scene with
The Patchwork Girl of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that the
Church ever opposed Socialism--true Socialism; just as today they
deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo, ever burned men for
teaching that the earth moves around the sun, ever sold the right
to commit crime, ever gave away the New World to Spain and
Portugal, ever buried newly-born infants in the cellars of
nunneries.
The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian,
Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their
formalists and traditionalists. If there is any church that
refuses so to adapt itself, the swift progress of enlightenment
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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 Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: peasants into countesses; the more accomplished a woman was, the more
she lost her value in their eyes, for, according to Michel, their
imagination had the less to do. In his opinion love, a mere matter of
the senses to inferior beings, was to great souls the most immense of
all moral creations and the most binding. To justify d'Arthez, he
instanced the example of Raffaele and the Fornarina. He might have
offered himself as an instance for this theory, he who had seen an
angel in the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. This strange fancy of d'Arthez
might, however, be explained in other ways; perhaps he had despaired
of meeting here below with a woman who answered to that delightful
vision which all men of intellect dream of and cherish; perhaps his
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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 Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: sometimes appeared at disadvantage. Had the object of her love
been indifferent, the result might have been otherwise, but her
ample nature apparently needed to contract itself a little, to
find room within Philip's heart. Not that in his presence she
became vain or petty or jealous; that would have been
impossible. She only grew credulous and absorbed and blind. A
kind of gentle obstinacy, too, developed itself in her nature,
and all suggestion of defects in him fell off from her as from
a marble image of Faith. If he said or did anything, there was
no appeal; that was settled, let us pass to something else.
I almost blush to admit that Aunt Jane--of whom it could by no
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