| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Vailima Prayers & Sabbath Morn by Robert Louis Stevenson: singing of hymns. The omission of this sacred duty would indicate,
not only a lack of religious training in the house chief, but a
shameless disregard of all that is reputable in Samoan social life.
No doubt, to many, the evening service is no more than a duty
fulfilled. The child who says his prayer at his mother's knee can
have no real conception of the meaning of the words he lisps so
readily, yet he goes to his little bed with a sense of heavenly
protection that he would miss were the prayer forgotten. The
average Samoan is but a larger child in most things, and would lay
an uneasy head on his wooden pillow if he had not joined, even
perfunctorily, in the evening service. With my husband, prayer,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: time with little jerks of the shoulder--the little hitching
movement of the dancer whose blood is filled with the fever of
syncopation. Even the crowd flowing down State Street must have
caught the rhythm of it, for the room soon filled.
At two o'clock the crowd began to thin. Business would be slack,
now, until five, when it would again pick up until closing time
at six. The fat vocalist put down his megaphone, wiped his
forehead, and regarded Terry with a warm blue eye. He had just
finished singing "I've Wandered Far from Dear Old Mother's
Knee." (Bernie Gottschalk Inc. Chicago. New York. You can't
get bit with a Gottschalk hit. 15 cents each.)
One Basket |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: also the feeling of Plato in other passages (Laws). But Anaxagoras had
been dead thirty years, and was beyond the reach of persecution.
It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers who
would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more violent
terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference can be drawn
from this circumstance as to the probability of the words attributed to him
having been actually uttered. They express the aspiration of the first
martyr of philosophy, that he would leave behind him many followers,
accompanied by the not unnatural feeling that they would be fiercer and
more inconsiderate in their words when emancipated from his control.
The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of
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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 House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: and the bare justice or legality of the claim was not so apparent,
after the Colonel's decease, as it had been pronounced in his
lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence,
and could not anywhere be found.
Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then,
but at various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards,
to obtain what they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right.
But, in course of time, the territory was partly regranted to more
favored individuals, and partly cleared and occupied by actual
settlers. These last, if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title,
would have laughed at the idea of any man's asserting a right--on
House of Seven Gables |
