| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: Lo, now, when to your task in the great house
At morning through the portico you pass,
One moment glance, where by the pillared wall
Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,
Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument
Of faiths forgot and races undivined:
Sit now disconsolate, remembering well
The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,
The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice,
Incessant, of the breakers on the shore.
As far as these from their ancestral shrine,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: "Well, well! if that isn't a joke!" exclaimed Vervelle. "Cardot is our
notary too."
"Take care! don't move," said the painter.
"Do pray hold still, Antenor," said the wife. "If you move about
you'll make monsieur miss; you should just see him working, and then
you'd understand."
"Oh! why didn't you have me taught the arts?" said Mademoiselle
Vervelle to her parents.
"Virginie," said her mother, "a young person ought not to learn
certain things. When you are married--well, till then, keep quiet."
During this first sitting the Vervelle family became almost intimate
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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 End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: of water right up to the bar. "Half-three. Half-
three. Half-three,"--and his modulated cry, returned
leisurely and monotonous, like the repeated call of a
bird, seemed to float away in sunshine and disappear in
the spacious silence of the empty sea and of a lifeless
shore lying open, north and south, east and west, with-
out the stir of a single cloud-shadow or the whisper of
any other voice.
The owner-engineer of the Sofala remained very still
behind the two seamen of different race, creed, and
color; the European with the time-defying vigor of
End of the Tether |
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 Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: do you know, I wonder if he might not have as good an answer against you
and me? We say we sometimes find him COARSE, but I suspect he might
retort that he finds us always dull. Perhaps a relevant exception."
He beamed on Archie, but no smile could be elicited.
"And now," proceeded the Judge, "for `Archibald on Capital Punishment.'
This is a very plausible academic opinion; of course I do not and I
cannot hold it; but that's not to say that many able and excellent
persons have not done so in the past. Possibly, in the past also, I may
have a little dipped myself in the same heresy. My third client, or
possibly my fourth, was the means of a return in my opinions. I never
saw the man I more believed in; I would have put my hand in the fire, I
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