| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Heap O' Livin' by Edgar A. Guest: on their way.
ROSES
When God first viewed the rose He'd made
He smiled, and thought it passing fair;
Upon the bloom His hands He laid,
And gently blessed each petal there.
He summoned in His artists then
And bade them paint, as ne'er before,
Each petal, so that earthly men
Might love the rose for evermore.
With Heavenly brushes they began
A Heap O' Livin' |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: We have here, in both parties, all the marks of an age of exhaustion, of
scepticism, of despair about finding any real truth. No wonder that
they were superseded by the Pyrrhonists, who doubted all things, and by
the Academy, which prided itself on setting up each thing to knock it
down again; and so by prudent and well-bred and tolerant qualifying of
every assertion, neither affirming too much, nor denying too much, keep
their minds in a wholesome--or unwholesome--state of equilibrium, as
stagnant pools are kept, that everything may have free toleration to rot
undisturbed.
These hapless caricaturists of the dialectic of Plato, and the logic of
Aristotle, careless of any vital principles or real results, ready
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