| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: and the old men; others proposed to abandon the town, and found a
colony far away. But vessels were lacking, and when the sun appeared
no decision had been made.
There was no fighting that day, all being too much exhausted. The
sleepers looked like corpses.
Then the Carthaginians, reflecting upon the cause of their disasters,
remembered that they had not dispatched to Phoenicia the annual
offering due to Tyrian Melkarth, and a great terror came upon them.
The gods were indignant with the Republic, and were, no doubt, about
to prosecute their vengeance.
They were considered as cruel masters, who were appeased with
Salammbo |
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 Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: they take into their hands as well as every thought they take
into their minds. Thus so many of their rhymes have suffered.
Some have an undertone of reviling. Some speak
familiarly of subjects which we are not accustomed to
mention, and others are impure in the extreme.
A third difficulty in making a collection of Chinese nursery
lore is greater than either the first or the second,--I refer to
the difficulty of a metrical rendition of the rhymes. I have
no doubt my readers can easily find flaws in my translations
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