| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Twilight Land by Howard Pyle: "why are you afraid of me? I will do you no harm. Listen," said
he; "I will use this piece of good luck in a way that Jacob Stuck
would never have thought of. I will make myself king. I will
conquer the world, and make myself emperor over all the earth.
Then I will make you my queen."
But the poor princess cried and cried.
"Hast thou any further commands?" said the Genie.
"Not now," said the prime-minister; "you may go now;" and the
Genie vanished like a puff of smoke.
But the princess cried and cried.
The prime-minister sat down beside her. "Why do you cry?" said
|
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 Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: have given articulate expression to the radicalism of his own
time, and, like Voltaire, might have constituted himself the
leader of the age, the incarnation of its most conspicuous
tendencies. But Lessing did nothing of the kind; and the
expectations formed of him by friends and enemies alike show how
little he was understood by either. "Nathan the Wise" was, as we
shall see, in the eighteenth century an entirely new phenomenon;
and its author was the pioneer of a quite new religious
philosophy.
Reimarus, the able author of the Fragments, in his attack upon
the evidences of revealed religion, had taken the same ground as
 The Unseen World and Other Essays |