| 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 Golden Bullet by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: "Yes, sir."
"Is that usually closed?"
"We never use the key for that, sir. It has a trick lock that you
can't open unless you know how."
"You said you went to the theatre yesterday evening. Did your
master give you permission to go?"
"Yes, sir. It's about a year now that he gave me money for a
theatre ticket every Saturday evening. He was very kind."
"Did you come into the house last night by the front door, or
through the garden?"
"Through the garden, sir. I walked down the Promenade from the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: but very idiotic themselves.' (Compare Aristotle, Met.)
Ion the rhapsode has just come to Athens; he has been exhibiting in
Epidaurus at the festival of Asclepius, and is intending to exhibit at the
festival of the Panathenaea. Socrates admires and envies the rhapsode's
art; for he is always well dressed and in good company--in the company of
good poets and of Homer, who is the prince of them. In the course of
conversation the admission is elicited from Ion that his skill is
restricted to Homer, and that he knows nothing of inferior poets, such as
Hesiod and Archilochus;--he brightens up and is wide awake when Homer is
being recited, but is apt to go to sleep at the recitations of any other
poet. 'And yet, surely, he who knows the superior ought to know the
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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 Royalty Restored/London Under Charles II by J. Fitzgerald Molloy: must we think of his majesty's execution upon a scaffold?" To
which question his royal highness vouchsafed no reply.
It was a favourite custom of his majesty, who invariably rose
betimes, to saunter in the park whilst the day was young and pass
an hour or two in stroking the heads of his feathered favourites
in the aviary, feeding the fowls in the pond with biscuits, and
playing with the crowd of spaniels ever attending his walks. For
his greater amusement he had brought together in the park a rare
and valuable collection of birds and beasts; amongst which were,
according to a quaint authority, "an onocratylus, or pelican, a
fowl between a stork and a swan--a melancholy water-fowl brought
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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 The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing,
which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.
`I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an
underground ventilation. I began to suspect their true import.
And what, I wondered, was this Lemur doing in my scheme of a
perfectly balanced organization? How was it related to the
indolent serenity of the beautiful Upper-worlders? And what was
hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft? I sat upon the
edge of the well telling myself that, at any rate, there was
nothing to fear, and that there I must descend for the solution
of my difficulties. And withal I was absolutely afraid to go!
The Time Machine |
