| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: transferred the whole thing, unopened, from my pocket to a drawer
which I double-locked would have amounted, for an initiated
observer, to some such pledge.
CHAPTER XII
Mrs. Saltram left me drawing my breath more quickly and indeed
almost in pain--as if I had just perilously grazed the loss of
something precious. I didn't quite know what it was--it had a
shocking resemblance to my honour. The emotion was the livelier
surely in that my pulses even yet vibrated to the pleasure with
which, the night before, I had rallied to the rare analyst, the
great intellectual adventurer and pathfinder. What had dropped
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: His personal care. They had lost all which could connect Him with the
working of their own souls, with their human duties and struggles, with
the belief that His mercy and love were counterparts of human mercy and
human love; in plain English, that He was loving and merciful at all.
The change came very gradually, thank God; you may read of noble sayings
and deeds here and there, for many centuries after Mohammed: but it
came; and then their belief in God's omnipotence and absoluteness
dwindled into the most dark, and slavish, and benumbing fatalism. His
unchangeableness became in their minds not an unchangeable purpose to
teach, forgive, and deliver men--as it seemed to Mohammed to have been--
but a mere brute necessity, an unchangeable purpose to have His own way,
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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: culture such as our district schools and colleges do not
contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name,
had a good deal more to live for, aye, and to die for, than they
have commonly.
When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he
is walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without
his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes
by and the cars return.
"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveler of the windy glens,
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 First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: also if they choose; but the executive, as such, has nothing to
do with it. His duty is to administer the present government,
as it came to his hands, and to transmit it, unimpaired by him,
to his successor.
Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice
of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?
In our present differences is either party without faith of being
in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of Nations, with his eternal
truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours
of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail,
by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American people.
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