| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird
to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish
a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird
chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in
this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey
albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such
emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will
tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the
sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered,
Moby Dick |
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 Exiles by Honore de Balzac: "Did you mark how he called him to him?" cried the sergeant of the
watch when the footsteps of the couple were no longer audible on the
strand. "Are not they a demon and his familiar?"
"Phooh!" puffed Jacqueline. "I felt smothered! I never marked our two
lodgers so carefully. 'Tis a bad thing for us women that the Devil can
wear so fair a mien!"
"Ay, cast some holy water on him," said Tirechair, "and you will see
him turn into a toad.--I am off to tell the office all about them."
On hearing this speech, the lady roused herself from the reverie into
which she had sunk, and looked at the constable, who was donning his
red-and-blue jacket.
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