| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: As vaded gloss no rubbing will refresh,
As flowers dead lie wither'd on the ground,
As broken glass no cement can redress,
So beauty blemish'd once's for ever lost,
In spite of physic, painting, pain and cost.
XIV.
Good night, good rest. Ah, neither be my share:
She bade good night that kept my rest away;
And daff'd me to a cabin hang'd with care,
To descant on the doubts of my decay.
'Farewell,' quoth she, 'and come again tomorrow:
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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 Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: good stuff in you, Loudon," he would say; "there is the right
stuff in you. Blood will tell, and you will come right in time. I
am not afraid my boy will ever disgrace me; I am only vexed he
should sometimes talk nonsense." And then he would pat my
shoulder or my hand with a kind of motherly way he had, very
affecting in a man so strong and beautiful.
As soon as I had graduated from the high school, he packed me
off to the Muskegon Commercial Academy. You are a
foreigner, and you will have a difficulty in accepting the reality
of this seat of education. I assure you before I begin that I am
wholly serious. The place really existed, possibly exists to-day:
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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 Master of the World by Jules Verne: machine, instead of being caught in the vortex of the cataract rose
under the impulse of its machinery like a bird with its huge wings
beating with tremendous power!
So this machine actually fulfilled a four-fold use! It was at the
same time automobile, boat, submarine, and airship. Earth, sea and
air, -- it could move through all three elements! And with what
power! With what speed! Al few instants sufficed to complete its
marvelous transformations. The same engine drove it along all its
courses! And I had been a witness of its metamorphoses! But that of
which I was still ignorant, and which I could perhaps discover, was
the source of the energy which drove the machine, and above all, who
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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 Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: When they reached the Vieille rue du Temple the three friends entered
one of the oldest houses in that street and passed up a shaking
staircase, the steps of which, caked with mud, led them in semi-
darkness, and through a stench peculiar to houses on an alley, to the
third story, where they beheld a door which painting alone could
render; literature would have to spend too many nights in suitably
describing it.
An old woman, in keeping with that door, and who might have been that
door in human guise, ushered the three friends into a room which
served as an ante-chamber, where, in spite of the warm atmosphere
which fills the streets of Paris, they felt the icy chill of crypts
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