| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: the conspiracies, seemingly no more important than the others,
ripened in a sudden heat of hatred and despair.
A little band of desperate secessionists, of which John Wilkes
Booth, an actor of a family of famous players, was the head, had
their usual meeting-place at the house of Mrs. Mary E. Surratt,
the mother of one of the number. Booth was a young man of
twenty-six, strikingly handsome, with an ease and grace of manner
which came to him of right from his theatrical ancestors. He was
a fanatical southerner, with a furious hatred against Lincoln and
the Union. After Lincoln's reelection he went to Canada, and
associated with the Confederate agents there; and whether or not
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: It was a heavy thought to me, as we drew up before the inn at
Kirkby-Lonsdale, that this scene was now to be enacted for the last
time. Alas! and had I known it, it was to go of with so inferior a
grace!
I had been injudiciously liberal to the post-boys of the chaise and
four. My own post-boy, he of the patched breeches, now stood
before me, his eyes glittering with greed, his hand advanced. It
was plain he anticipated something extraordinary by way of a
POURBOIRE; and considering the marches and counter-marches by which
I had extended the stage, the military character of our affairs
with Mr. Bellamy, and the bad example I had set before him at the
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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 Lady Susan by Jane Austen: miserable about Sir James Martin, and have no other way in the world of
helping myself but by writing to you, for I am forbidden even speaking to
my uncle and aunt on the subject; and this being the case, I am afraid my
applying to you will appear no better than equivocation, and as if I
attended to the letter and not the spirit of mamma's commands. But if you
do not take my part and persuade her to break it off, I shall be half
distracted, for I cannot bear him. No human being but YOU could have any
chance of prevailing with her. If you will, therefore, have the unspeakably
great kindness of taking my part with her, and persuading her to send Sir
James away, I shall be more obliged to you than it is possible for me to
express. I always disliked him from the first: it is not a sudden fancy, I
Lady Susan |
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 Little Britain by Washington Irving: serpents, and his own visage, which is a title-page of
tribulation, they have spread great gloom through the minds of
the people of Little Britain. They shake their heads whenever
they go by Bow Church, and observe, that they never expected
any good to come of taking down that steeple, which in old
times told nothing but glad tidings, as the history of
Whittington and his Cat bears witness.
The rival oracle of Little Britain is a substantial
cheesemonger, who lives in a fragment of one of the old family
mansions, and is as magnificently lodged as a round-bellied
mite in the midst of one of his own Cheshires. Indeed, he is a
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