| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas' I found Antonia starting off
on foot for Russian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed.
I offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me.
There had been another black frost the night before, and the air
was clear and heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads
had been despoiled, hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been
transformed into brown, rattling, burry stalks.
We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go
in and get warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes
and Christmas melons, heaped in the storeroom for winter.
As we rode away with the spade, Antonia suggested that we
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: link--the link it was so odd he should frivolously have managed to
lose.
"You know you told me something I've never forgotten and that again
and again has made me think of you since; it was that tremendously
hot day when we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for the breeze.
What I allude to was what you said to me, on the way back, as we
sat under the awning of the boat enjoying the cool. Have you
forgotten?"
He had forgotten, and was even more surprised than ashamed. But
the great thing was that he saw in this no vulgar reminder of any
"sweet" speech. The vanity of women had long memories, but she was
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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 Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians by Martin Luther: Cain he had no faith or trust in God's grace, but strutted about in his own
fancied worth. When God refused to recognize Cain's worth, Cain got
angry at God and at Abel.
The Holy Spirit speaks of faith in different ways in the Sacred Scriptures.
Sometimes He speaks of faith independently of other matters. When the
Scriptures speak of faith in the absolute or abstract, faith refers to
justification directly. But when the Scripture speaks of rewards and works
it speaks of compound or relative faith. We will furnish some examples.
Galatians 5:6, "Faith which worketh by love." Leviticus 18:5, "Which if a
man do, he shall live in them." Matthew 19:17, "If thou wilt enter into
life, keep the commandments." Psalm 37:27, "Depart from evil, and do
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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 Intentions by Oscar Wilde: avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the
conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic
details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest
whatsoever. But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet
transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of
pity or of awe, and shows their colour-element, and their wonder,
and their true ethical import also, and builds out of them a world
more real than reality itself, and of loftier and more noble import
- who shall set limits to him? Not the apostles of that new
Journalism which is but the old vulgarity 'writ large.' Not the
apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine of the
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