| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: pageants I have spoken of, and those were as much educational as
religious, and as much social as either. But they had a clear established
connection between everything they did--and God. Their cleanliness,
their health, their exquisite order, the rich peaceful beauty
of the whole land, the happiness of the children, and above all
the constant progress they made--all this was their religion.
They applied their minds to the thought of God, and worked
out the theory that such an inner power demanded outward expression.
They lived as if God was real and at work within them.
As for those little temples everywhere--some of the women
were more skilled, more temperamentally inclined, in this direction,
Herland |
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: very solemn in such a fact as this. It brings us down to some of the
very deepest questions of metaphysic. This mental insight of which we
boast so much, what is it? Is it altogether a process of our own brain
and will? If it be, why have so few the power, even among men of power,
and they so seldom? If brain alone were what was wanted, what could not
Aristotle have discovered? Or is it that no man can see a thing unless
God shows it him? Is it that in each separate act of induction, that
mysterious and transcendental process which cannot, let logicians try as
they will, be expressed by any merely logical formula, Aristotelian or
other--is it I say, that in each separate act of induction we do not
find the law, but the law is shown to us, by Him who made the law?
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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 The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: Anon Adonis comes with horn and hounds;
She, silly queen, with more than love's good will,
Forbade the boy he should not pass those grounds:
'Once,' quoth she, 'did I see a fair sweet youth
Here in these brakes deep-wounded with a boar,
Deep in the thigh, a spectacle of ruth!
See, in my thigh,' quoth she, 'here was the sore.
She showed hers: he saw more wounds than one,
And blushing fled, and left her all alone.
X.
Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely pluck'd, soon vaded,
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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 Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: the body would not be even approximately fresh the next night.
So taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory,
we left our silent guest on the slab in the dark, and bent every
energy to the mixing of a new solution; the weighing and measuring
supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.
The awful
event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something
from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol
blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless
edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst
the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either
Herbert West: Reanimator |
