The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum: volcanic fires glow and the molten lava flows in every direction, and
the air is hotter than blue blazes."
"That will be the end of me, all right," said the Scarecrow,
sorrowfully. "One small blaze, blue or green, is enough to reduce me
to an ash-heap."
"Do you surrender?" demanded the King.
Billina whispered something in the Scarecrow's ear that made him smile
and put his hands in his jacket pockets.
"No!" returned Ozma, boldly answering the King. Then she said to her army:
"Forward, my brave soldiers, and fight for your Ruler and yourselves,
unto death!"
 Ozma of Oz |
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 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades,
crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles,
and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and
thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing
to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, - lying there
moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor
in the Desert could not seem more remote from life, - the cool
breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half-
sunken pillars, - why should I tell of these things, that I should
live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with
boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots we
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |