| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: on. He was very silent now. In those high regions the rarefied air is
hard to breathe by those born in the valleys; every breath he drew hurt
him, and the blood oozed out from the tips of his fingers. Before the next
wall of rock he began to work. The height of this seemed infinite, and he
said nothing. The sound of his tool rang night and day upon the iron rocks
into which he cut steps. Years passed over him, yet he worked on; but the
wall towered up always above him to heaven. Sometimes he prayed that a
little moss or lichen might spring up on those bare walls to be a companion
to him; but it never came.
And the years rolled on; he counted them by the steps he had cut--a few for
a year--only a few. He sang no more; he said no more, "I will do this or
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: To this I answer, that here also I do not speak from theory.
I lay before you the ascertained results of years of experience.
More than two years ago, moved by the misery and despair of the
unemployed, I opened the Food and Shelter Depots in London already
described. Here are a large number of men every night, many of them of
the lowest type of casuals who crawl about the streets, a certain
proportion criminals, and about as difficult a class to manage as I
should think could be got together, and while there will be 200 of them
in a single building night after night, from the first opening of the
doors in the evening until the last man has departed in the morning,
there shall scarcely be a word of dissatisfaction; anyway, nothing in
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
