| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: houses, semi-detached but indissolubly united, were like married
couples on bad terms. Often, however, as he had gone to the
beginning he had never gone beyond. Her aunt was dead - that he
immediately guessed, as well as that it made a difference; but when
she had for the first time mentioned her number he found himself,
on her leaving him, not a little agitated by this sudden
liberality. She wasn't a person with whom, after all, one got on
so very fast: it had taken him months and months to learn her
name, years and years to learn her address. If she had looked, on
this reunion, so much older to him, how in the world did he look to
her? She had reached the period of life he had long since reached,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Master of the World by Jules Verne: his? Even if the first machine still existed, it was no longer heard
from; and would not the second, in the same way, after having
disclosed its powers, disappear in its turn, without a single trace?
What gave weight to this probability was that since the arrival of
this report at Washington twenty-four hours before, the presence of
the extraordinary boat hadn't been announced from anywhere along the
shore. Neither had it been seen on any other coast. Though, of
course, the assertion that it would not reappear at all would have
been hazardous, to say the least.
I noted another interesting and possibly important point. It was a
singular coincidence which indeed Mr. Ward suggested to me, 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 Glasses by Henry James: even now to hear it bumping up and down my stairs. That was really
what I saw of him in the light of his behaviour. He had fallen in
love as he might have broken his leg, and the fracture was of a
sort that would make him permanently lame. It was the whole man
who limped and lurched, with nothing of him left in the same
position as before. The tremendous cleverness, the literary
society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all seemed
to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. I
hadn't had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great
man at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who
had addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember
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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 Crito by Plato: opinions, and the opinions of some men only, are to be valued, and that
other opinions, and the opinions of other men, are not to be valued. I ask
you whether I was right in maintaining this?
CRITO: Certainly.
SOCRATES: The good are to be regarded, and not the bad?
CRITO: Yes.
SOCRATES: And the opinions of the wise are good, and the opinions of the
unwise are evil?
CRITO: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And what was said about another matter? Is the pupil who
devotes himself to the practice of gymnastics supposed to attend to the
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