| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: it will do?"--and the bird shivered. But the others cried, "It is too
valuable; it might get lost. If it were to try to fly it might fall down
and break its neck." And the bird, with its foot chained to the log, sat
looking upward into the clear blue sky; the sky, in which it had never
been--for the bird--the bird, knew what it would do--because it was an
eaglet!
There is one woman known to many of us, as each human creature knows but
one on earth; and it is upon our knowledge of that woman that we base our
certitude.
For those who do not know her, and have not this ground, it is probably
profitable and necessary that they painfully collect isolated facts and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: to it I plunged feet foremost toward my executioner.
At the instant that he felt the spear come away from Ja's
hand the creature must have opened his huge jaws to catch me,
for when I came down, still clinging to the butt end
of the weapon, the point yet rested in his mouth and the
result was that the sharpened end transfixed his lower jaw.
With the pain he snapped his mouth closed.
I fell upon his snout, lost my hold upon the spear,
rolled the length of his face and head, across his
short neck onto his broad back and from there to the ground.
Scarce had I touched the earth than I was upon my feet,
At the Earth's Core |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Master of the World by Jules Verne: aboard their craft, as if expecting a long absence. Perhaps the
"Terror" was about to traverse immense distances; perhaps even, the
captain intended to regain his Island X, in the midst of the Pacific.
Sometimes I saw him wander about the Eyrie buried in thought, or he
would stop and raise his arm toward heaven as if in defiance of that
God with Whom he assumed to divide the empire of the world. Was not
his overweening pride leading him toward insanity? An insanity which
his two companions, hardly less excited than he, could do nothing to
subdue! Had he not come to regard himself as mightier than the
elements which he had so audaciously defied even when he possessed
only an airship, the "Albatross?" And now, how much more powerful had
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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 Apology by Plato: below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and
finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and
Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were
righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What
would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and
Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I
myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and
conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other
ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there
will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with
theirs. Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true
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