| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: whole weight of domestic toil. From the days of Lucretia, the great Roman
dame whom we find spinning with her handmaidens deep into the night, and
whose personal dignity was so dear to her that, violated, she sought only
death, to those of the mother of the Gracchi, one of the last of the great
line, we find everywhere, erect, labouring, and resolute, the Roman woman
who gave birth to the men who built up Roman greatness. A few centuries
later, and Rome also had reached that dangerous spot in the order of social
change which Greece had reached centuries before her. Slave labour and the
enjoyment of the unlimited spoils of subject races had done away for ever
with the demand for physical labour on the part of the members of the
dominant race. Then came the period when the male still occupied himself
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works exist at
all but in the imagination of the student. For the bulk of
the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and
those in which energy of thought is combined with any
stateliness of utterance may be almost counted on the
fingers. Looking round in English for a book that should
answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like poetry and sense
that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to
Milton's AREOPAGITICA, and can name no other instance for the
moment. Two things at least are plain: that if a man will
condescend to nothing more commonplace in the way of reading,
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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 The Mayflower Compact: Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of
the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country,
a Voyage to plant the first colony in the Northerne Parts
of Virginia; doe, by these Presents, solemnly and mutually
in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and
combine ourselves together into a civill Body Politick,
for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance
of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof do enact,
constitute, and frame, such just and equall Laws, Ordinances,
Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time,
as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the
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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 Timaeus by Plato: universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no
greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man. This is
the greatest boon of sight: and of the lesser benefits why should I speak?
even the ordinary man if he were deprived of them would bewail his loss,
but in vain. Thus much let me say however: God invented and gave us sight
to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven,
and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to
them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and
partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely
unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries. The same may be
affirmed of speech and hearing: they have been given by the gods to the
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