| 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: life, even if he doesn't choose quite the right way," answered the
commissioner calmly, playing with a lead pencil.
Knoll's expression was defiant now. He laughed harshly and began
again: "What I'm tellin' you now is the truth whether you believe
it or not. I didn't kill the man. I took the watch and purse
from him. I thought he was drunk. If he was killed, I didn't
do it."
"He was killed by a shot."
"A shot? Why, yes, I heard a shot, but I didn't think any more
about it, I didn't think there was anythin' doing, I thought somebody
was shootin' a cat, or else-"
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: no sound in the Jungle. It seemed as though Won-tolla were
fawning on them to come ashore; and "Turn and take hold!" said
the leader of the dholes. The entire Pack flung themselves at
the shore, threshing and squattering through the shoal water,
till the face of the Waingunga was all white and torn, and the
great ripples went from side to side, like bow-waves from a
boat. Mowgli followed the rush, stabbing and slicing as the
dholes, huddled together, rushed up the river-beach in one wave.
Then the long fight began, heaving and straining and splitting
and scattering and narrowing and broadening along the red,
wet sands, and over and between the tangled tree-roots,
The Second Jungle Book |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber
roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff
fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a
measured distance in the interest of his constitution.
There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon
both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the
dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be
hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the
tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both sides must feel
a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they
draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a
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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 Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: and Slave and literatures so little professable (to coin a word) as
the literatures of the North (which, so far from providing lessons,
stand very badly in need of them); when the curriculum is full of the
everlasting lectures on Shakespeare and the sixteenth century,--it is
strange that some one has not restored the teaching of the occult
philosophies, once the glory of the University of Paris, under the
title of anthropology. Germany, so childlike and so great, has
outstripped France in this particular; in Germany they have professors
of a science of far more use than a knowledge of the heterogeneous
philosophies, which all come to the same thing at bottom.
Once admit that certain beings have the power of discerning the future
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