| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: 'What is the quality of mine offence,
Being constrain'd with dreadful circumstance?
May my pure mind with the foul act dispense,
My low-declined honour to advance?
May any terms acquit me from this chance?
The poison'd fountain clears itself again;
And why not I from this compelled stain?
With this, they all at once began to say,
Her body's stain her mind untainted clears;
While with a joyless smile she turns away
The face, that map which deep impression bears
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so
strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character,
already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune
to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by
Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more
delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite
passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a
great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my
reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous
did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expression.
Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is
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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 Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: destructive to Caracalla, Commodus, and Maximinus to have imitated
Severus, they not having sufficient valour to enable them to tread in
his footsteps. Therefore a prince, new to the principality, cannot
imitate the actions of Marcus, nor, again, is it necessary to follow
those of Severus, but he ought to take from Severus those parts which
are necessary to found his state, and from Marcus those which are
proper and glorious to keep a state that may already be stable and
firm.
CHAPTER XX
ARE FORTRESSES, AND MANY OTHER THINGS TO WHICH PRINCES
OFTEN RESORT, ADVANTAGEOUS OR HURTFUL?
The Prince |
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 The Odyssey by Homer: harness and caught up two long lances in my hands, and went
on the decking of the prow, for thence methought that
Scylla of the rock would first be seen, who was to bring
woe on my company. Yet could I not spy her anywhere, and my
eyes waxed weary for gazing all about toward the darkness
of the rock.
"Next we began to sail up the narrow strait lamenting. For
on the one hand lay Scylla, and on the other mighty
Charybdis in terrible wise sucked down the salt sea water.
As often as she belched it forth, like a cauldron on a
great fire she would seethe up through all her troubled
The Odyssey |
