| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: time since I had seen John.
'Dearest mamma, out here and nothing over your shoulders! You ARE
imprudent. Where is your wrap? Mr. Tottenham, will you please
fetch mamma's wrap for her?'
'If mamma so instructs me,' he said audaciously.
'Do as Cecily tells you,' I laughed, and he went and did it, while I
by the light of a quartermaster's lantern distinctly saw my daughter
blush.
Another time, when Cecily came down to undress, she bent over me as
I lay in the lower berth with unusual solicitude. I had been
dozing, and I jumped.
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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 Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: cranes are slowly sailing north. And that is all you see. You do
not see the shore; you do not see the main; you are looking but at
the border-land of that great unknown, the heaving ocean still
slumbering beneath its chilly coverlid of mist, out of which come
the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes.
So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at the
lighter leads to the same conclusion.
Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense of
humor,--two traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying
together over the meadows of imagination. For, as it might be put,
"The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
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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 Intentions by Oscar Wilde: attention was even then guilty.
His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by
Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside
his achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left
to us hardly justifies his reputation.
But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a
personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy
sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised
that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than
the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work without
interest. We hear of William Blake stopping in the Royal Academy
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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 House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Stretching out her long, lank arm, she put a paper of pearl
buttons, a jew's-harp, or whatever the small article might be,
in its destined place, and straightway vanished back into the dusk,
as if the world need never hope for another glimpse of her. It
might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to minister to
the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied divinity
or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential and
awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had no
such flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately
come forward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but,
like other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed
House of Seven Gables |
