| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: splendor that radiated from his youth and strength. The old man
upon whose temper his remarks were doing such deadly work was
combed and curried to a finish, a bridegroom swept and garnished;
but alas for age! Had I been the bride, I should have taken the
giant, dust and all. He had by no means done with the old man.
"Why, yu've hung weddin' gyarments on every limb!" he now
drawled, with admiration. "Who is the lucky lady this trip?"
The old man seemed to vibrate. "Tell you there ain't been no
other! Call me a Mormon, would you?"
"Why, that--"
"Call me a Mormon? Then name some of my wives. Name two. Name
The Virginian |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: in A.D. 1813 the writer was twenty-two years old caught my eye.
Two and twenty is an interesting age in which one is easily
reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of reflection being
weak and the power of imagination strong.
In another place the phrase: "At night we stood in again,"
arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase. "Let's
see what it is all about," I thought, without excitement.
Oh! but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every other
line in their close-set and regular order. It was like the drone
of a monotonous voice. A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest
subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively
Within the Tides |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: had prevented him, had ordered his rendezvous at Billerecay, and
intended to possess the pass at Malden on the 11th, where Sir
Thomas Honnywood, with the county-trained bands, was to be the same
day.
The same evening the Lord Goring, with all his forces, making about
five thousand six hundred men, horse and foot, came to Colchester,
and encamping without the suburbs, under command of the cannon of
St. Mary's fort, made disposition to fight the Parliament forces if
they came up.
The 12th, the Lord Goring came into Colchester, viewed the fort in
St. Mary's churchyard, ordered more cannon to be planted upon it,
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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: 'depths of his own self-consciousness.' Socrates had already spoken of God
the creator, who made all things for the best. While he ridiculed the
superficial explanations of phenomena which were current in his age, he
recognised the marks both of benevolence and of design in the frame of man
and in the world. The apparatus of winds and waters is contemptuously
rejected by him in the Phaedo, but he thinks that there is a power greater
than that of any Atlas in the 'Best' (Phaedo; Arist. Met.). Plato,
following his master, affirms this principle of the best, but he
acknowledges that the best is limited by the conditions of matter. In the
generation before Socrates, Anaxagoras had brought together 'Chaos' and
'Mind'; and these are connected by Plato in the Timaeus, but in accordance
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