| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Good friends, who most ingenuously prate
About my songs to such and such a one.
But everything is all askew to-night, --
As if the time were come, or almost come,
For their untenanted mirage of me
To lose itself and crumble out of sight,
Like a tall ship that floats above the foam
A little while, and then breaks utterly.
Sonnet
The master and the slave go hand in hand,
Though touch be lost. The poet is a slave,
|
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 Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: hundred thoughts suggested by the book might be written down, but most of
them would begin and end with this fact of strangeness. To read the very
names in the table of contents is like listening to a Buddhist bell, struck
somewhere far away. Some of his tales are of the long ago, and yet they
seem to illumine the very souls and minds of the little men who are at this
hour crowding the decks of Japan's armored cruisers. But many of the
stories are about women and children,-- the lovely materials from which the
best fairy tales of the world have been woven. They too are strange, these
Japanese maidens and wives and keen-eyed, dark-haired girls and boys; they
are like us and yet not like us; and the sky and the hills and the flowers
are all different from our. Yet by a magic of which Mr. Hearn, almost alone
Kwaidan |
