| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Case of The Lamp That Went Out by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: "Never mind about that, Franz, but help me to pray that I may get
there in time."
She almost pushed the old man out of the door with these last
words and shut and locked it behind him.
She wanted to be alone with this hideous fear that was clutching
at her heart. For it was not to Franz that she could tell the
thoughts that came to her lips now as she sank down, wringing her
hands, before a picture of the Madonna: "Oh Holy Virgin, Mother
of our Lord, plead for me! let me be with my dear mistress when
the terrible time comes and they take her husband away from her,
or, if preferring death to disgrace, he ends his life by his own
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Hath now this dread and blacke Complexion smear'd
With Heraldry more dismall: Head to foote
Now is he to take Geulles, horridly Trick'd
With blood of Fathers, Mothers, Daughters, Sonnes,
Bak'd and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous, and damned light
To their vilde Murthers, roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o're-sized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like Carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Olde Grandsire Priam seekes
Pol. Fore God, my Lord, well spoken, with good accent,
Hamlet |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: vital to effect than the cleverest representation of the whole.
The art of partially revealing is more telling, even, than the ars
celare artem. Who has not suspected through a veil a fairer face
than veil ever hid? Who has not been delightedly duped by the
semi-disclosures of a dress? The principle is just as true in any
one branch of art as it is of the attempted developments by one of
the suggestions of another. Yet who but has thus felt its force?
Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration on chancing upon an
illustrated edition of some book whose story he had lain to heart?
Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does not know, and yet
which purport to be his! And I venture to believe that to more than
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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 A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: heroic account of itself at Gallipoli; Australia who came with her
cruisers, and with also her armies to the West Front and in South Africa;
New Zealand who came from the other side of the world with men and money-
-three million pounds in gift, not loan, from one million people. And
the Boers? The Boers, who latest of all, not twenty years before, had
been at war with England, and conquered by her, and then by her had been
given a Boer Government. What did the Boers do? In spite of the Kaiser's
telegram of sympathy, in spite of his plans and his hopes, they too, like
Canada and New Zealand and all the rest, sided of their own free will
with disagreeable England against agreeable Germany. They first stamped
out a German rebellion, instigated in their midst, and then these Boers
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