| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric
talker, plain, strong, and cheerful; and the things and the people of
which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the minds of
those who heard him. This, with a certain added colouring of
rhetoric and rodomontade, must have been the style of Burns, who
equally charmed the ears of duchesses and hostlers.
Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure
in his narration. The Engineers, for instance, was a service which
he praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the
sergeants; but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in
particular, one among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: scenes and tones of color to painters. What a forest of crossbeams
supported the mills with their huge sails and their wheels! What
strange effects were produced by the piles or props driven into the
water to project the upper floors of the houses above the stream!
Unfortunately, the art of genre painting did not exist in those days,
and that of engraving was in its infancy. We have therefore lost that
curious spectacle, still offered, though in miniature, by certain
provincial towns, where the rivers are overhung with wooden houses,
and where, as at Vendome, the basins, full of water grasses, are
enclosed by immense iron railings, to isolate each proprietor's share
of the stream, which extends from bank to bank.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells: unable to stop, leapt the writhing body.
In another second he had plunged, unhurt, into a
black passage, and incontinently someone, coming, it
may be, in a transverse direction, blundered violently
into him. He was hurling down a staircase in absolute
darkness. He reeled, and was struck again, and
came against a wall with his hands. He was crushed
by a weight of struggling bodies, whirled round, and
thrust to the right. A vast pressure pinned him. He
could not breathe, his ribs seemed cracking. He felt
a momentary relaxation, and then the whole mass of
When the Sleeper Wakes |
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 Confessio Amantis by John Gower: Lich unto racches in a route.
Such lucre is non above grounde,
Which is noght of tho racches founde; 4390
For wher thei se beyete sterte,
That schal hem in no wise asterte,
Bot thei it dryve into the net
Of lucre, which Usure hath set.
Usure with the riche duelleth,
To al that evere he beith and selleth
He hath ordeined of his sleyhte
Mesure double and double weyhte:
Confessio Amantis |
