| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: He uttered these words with a passionate tenderness, standing on
the edge of the stream, and gazing into its waters. His slight
frame trembled with the violence of his emotion. Asenath, who had
become very pale as he commenced to speak, gradually flushed over
neck and brow as she listened. Her head drooped, the gathered
flowers fell from her hands, and she hid her face. For a few
minutes no sound was heard but the liquid gurgling of the water,
and the whistle of a bird in the thicket beside them. Richard
Hilton at last turned, and, in a voice of hesitating entreaty,
pronounced her name--
"Asenath!"
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming
of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then,
after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and
six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another
chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and
tremulousness and meditation as before.
But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent
revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye
for colours and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere
fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed
with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him
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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 Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor attendant, a
handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate expression, and the
good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows
meeting over a short thick nose and a complexion like pale brown
paper. Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-
natured eyes only were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing
voice alone that broke the silence with an appeal to me:
"N'oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri." In three months, simply
by playing with us, she had taught me not only to speak French
but to read it as well. She was indeed an excellent playmate.
In the distance, half way down to the great gates, a light, open
Some Reminiscences |
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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: hear presently, the discoveries of Archimedes and Hipparchus were
allowed to remain where they were for centuries. The Dialectic of Plato
and Socrates was degraded into a mere art for making anything appear
alternately true and false, and among the Megaric school, for
undermining the ground of all science, and paving the way for
scepticism, by denying the natural world to be the object of certain
knowledge. The only element of Plato's thought to which they clung was,
as we shall find from the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in
which, deserting his inductive method, he has fallen below himself into
the popular cacoethes, and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the
mysterious powers of numbers, and of the regular solids.
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