| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: humanity, and progress.
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his
single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back;
sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish
forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government;
with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds,
and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.
He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any
other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now
outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them;
but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so
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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 Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: the one she was looking at. `And this one is the most provoking
of all--but I'll tell you what--' she added, as a sudden
thought struck her, `I'll follow it up to the very top shelf of
all. It'll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!'
But even this plan failed: the `thing' went through the
ceiling as quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to it.
`Are you a child or a teetotum?' the Sheep said, as she took up
another pair of needles. `You'll make me giddy soon, if you go
on turning round like that.' She was now working with fourteen
pairs at once, and Alice couldn't help looking at her in great
astonishment.
Through the Looking-Glass |
