| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves. It was with me that
day as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and
immediate things and looked at life altogether.... But it played
the very devil with the copying up of my arrears of notes to
which I had vowed the latter half of that day.
After that reunion Ewart and I met much and talked much, and in
our subsequent encounters his monologue was interrupted and I
took my share. He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake
at nights thinking him over, and discoursed and answered him in
my head as I went in the morning to the College. I am by nature
a doer and only by the way a critic; his philosophical assertion
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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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: fairly say, afforded frequent examples of fathers who brought
their children, husbands their wives, children their mothers, to
untimely ends; and that brothers should put brothers to death
was assumed, like the postulates of mathematicians, as the
common and recognized royal first principle of safety.
Let us here record an example in the early life of Demetrius,
showing his natural humane and kindly disposition. It was an
adventure which passed betwixt him and Mithridates, the son of
Ariobarzanes, who was about the same age with Demetrius, and
lived with him, in attendance on Antigonus; and although nothing
was said or could be said to his reproach, he fell under
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